It's been a tough few years to be ice: a big melt is having devastating effects ranging from the Swiss Alps to Antarctica.
Two catastrophic years of extreme warming wiped out 10% of Swiss glacier volume, an amount equal to what was lost between 1960 and 1990, the Swiss Commission for Cryosphere Observation reported on Thursday.
Glacier tongues are collapsing and many smaller glaciers are disappearing in Switzerland, so much so that monitoring of the St. Annafirn glacier near the Italian border had to be suspended.
The human-caused climate change that is heating up the world’s atmosphere and oceans also is reaching the remote ends of the Earth, wiping out wildlife and adding to the vicious cycle of global warming.
Antarctica is emerging from its winter with the lowest level of sea ice ever recorded, the U.N. weather agency reported earlier this week. Over the past year, the continent lost an area of ice larger than Egypt.
”There is growing concern about rapid changes in the cryosphere – melting sea ice, ice sheets and glaciers,” says Omar Baddour, the World Meteorological Organization’s chief of climate monitoring.
“The drop in Antarctic sea ice this year has been really dramatic," he says. "What happens in Antarctica and the Arctic affects the entire globe.”
Scientists at WMO’s Global Cryosphere Watch say they're working with Earth scientists to monitor whether this is part of the Antarctic’s normal variability or if it marks the start of a new and worrying event triggered by excess greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and ocean.
The Swiss commisison, part of the Swiss Academy of Sciences, says the massive loss of ice in the Swiss Alps is due to a winter with very low volumes of snow and high temperatures during the summer.
Earlier this year, a study in Science projected that two-thirds of the world's 215,000 land-based glaciers would melt and disappear by the end of the century at the pace of current warming. Those do not include the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland.
Arctic ice already disappearing
In the northern oceans, Arctic sea ice has been in long-term decline and this year’s summer minimum extent coverage was one of the lowest ever. Until recently Antarctica was thought to be mostly stable, but the Antarctic sea-ice deficit seen in the winter of 2023 follows the two lowest summers in 2022 and 2023.
A study published in Nature this month found there have been three record-breaking low sea ice summers in the past seven years, “suggesting that the underlying process controlling Antarctic sea ice coverage may have altered.”
Antarctica’s massive glacial ice expanse and the surrounding sea ice cover reflect the sun’s energy back to the atmosphere and space making it critical to help regulate the climate. When the ice disappears, the dark ocean surface absorbs most of the solar energy and the water grows warmer. Lost sea ice contributes to rising temperatures and helps perpetuate the cycle of global warming.
Preliminary data based on satellite surveys and released on Monday by the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center, or NSIDC, found the maximum extent of Antarctic sea ice remained below 17 million square kilometers or the first time since 1979 when the initial satellite survey was made.
This amounts to a full million square kilometers below the previous record low recorded just last year, and is more than the size of Egypt. NSIDC said scientists are concerned they could be witnessing “the beginning of a long-term trend of decline for Antarctic sea ice, since oceans are warming globally, and warm water mixing in the Southern Ocean polar layer could continue.”
Impact on native animals and plants
Emperor penguins, Antarctic’s largest penguins and the only species that breeds during the winter, experienced unprecedented breeding failure across four colonies in a region of Antarctica in the central and eastern Bellingshausen Sea where there was total sea ice loss in 2022.
If the warming trends continue, more than 90% of emperor penguin colonies may become virtually extinct by the end of the century, according to research by the British Antarctic Survey.
As the continent warms, scientists are also seeing an expansion of native plant species, providing evidence of the ecosystem responding to climate change and suggesting that future warming will trigger significant changes to fragile Antarctic ecosystems.
This year’s non-stop surge of record high temperatures and climate-related disasters will be at the center of the debate at the next U.N. climate summit, or COP 28, hosted by Dubai, United Arab Emirates, a major petroleum producer.
Ahead of the summit, which will run for almost two weeks starting at the end of November, advocacy groups are calling for an agreement between the two largest polluters, China and the United States, for reducing carbon emissions.
