Collier Glacier, which flows down the flanks of the Three Sisters in the central Oregon Cascade Range, has shrunk by more than 20% since the late 1980s.  The Oregon State University research program findings are consistent with glacial retreat all over the world.

The glacier, which is at an elevation of more than 7,000 feet and is one of the largest in Oregon, has shrunk now to about half of its peak size in the 1850s, when it once was nearly two miles long.

In 1910, the terminus of Collier Glacier reached Collier Cone. Since 1910, however, Collier has retreated almost two kilometers and lost over one square kilometer of its area.

The glaciers in the Pacific Northwest – including Collier and Mount Hood glaciers such as Eliot – exist primarily because of massive winter snowfall, more than 20 feet at times on the Three Sisters. The glaciers grow when not all the snow melts during the summer, and shrink when more snow melts in summer than falls in winter.

Despite the worldwide uproar over the IPCC’s recent admission of a “regrettable error” about the rate of melting of Himalayan glaciers, glaciers around the world continue to disappear.

The IPCC’s 2007 report that “glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues,the likelihood of them “disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high.”

Glaciologist Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University says Himalayan glaciers are thinning and retreating at a rapid pace, just not at a demonstrably faster rate than in many other parts of the world. But it’s hard to know for sure. Only about 600 of some 46,000 glaciers in that region are being monitored. Of those, 95% are in retreat. You can’t tell how much mass the glaciers are losing without first knowing the depth of affected glaciers so as to calculate their volume. Currently, such data are largely nonexistent.

A new study by a team from the Netherlands estimated the changes in the thickness of Himalayan glaciers and found that by 2050 the upstream flow of the Brahmaputra and Indus rivers could shrink 19.6% and 8.4%, respectively, despite 25% more rain.

The Brahmaputra and Indus basins are most susceptible to reductions of flow, threatening the food security of an estimated 60 million people.

The Ganges and Yangtze rivers could see declines of 17.6% and 5.2%, respectively.The Yellow River fares best, because melt water accounts for just 8% of its flow. With rainfall predicted to rise by 14%, the river is projected to be able to feed an extra 3 million people by 2050.

Glaciers continue to melt in South America. Glacier Number 15 of Antisana, one of the Ecuadorian capitals’ main sources of potable water, lost at least 36% of its original mass in the last 50 years. The Antisana is a snow-capped peak of the eastern branch of the Andes, 50 kilometers to the east. Cotopaxi, one of the world’s highest active volcanoes whose snow-covered cone can also be seen from Quito, lost 40% of its glacial mass between 1976 and 2006. The same is happening to glaciers in the Real (Royal) 888 branch of the Andes in Bolivia and the Blanca range in Peru and Colombia, which have lost 30% of their mass on average.

In North America, the U.S. Geological Survey says Glacier National Park’s glaciers will be gone by 2020 – about ten years ahead of schedule. The park will soon need a new name.

In Africa, The Furtwängler Glacier near the summit of Kilimanjaro shrunk by almost half between 1976 and 2000 – and has since shrunk by an additional 26%. To the north of Kilimanjaro lies Mount Kenya, the second tallest mountain on the African continent. Mount Kenya has a number of small glaciers that have lost at least 45% of their mass since the middle of the 20th century. There were eighteen glaciers atop Mount Kenya in 1900. Now, only eleven remain – and four of those, as mere ghosts. The “Mountains of the Moon” glaciers of the Ruwenzori Mountains, which span the border of Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, have shrunk by 50% over the past 50 years. The glacier on Uganda’s Mount Stanley – Africa’s third-highest mountain – has split due to excessive melting caused by climate change and has shrunk in size from about 2.3 square miles in the 1950s to its current coverage of less than one-half of a square mile. It is melting so rapidly it is expected to disappear entirely within 40 years.

A recent post reported on scientists’ findings that Greenland’s glaciers are melting from the bottom up. Findings from another team of scientists help explain why: subtropical waters from warmer latitudes are reaching Greenland’s glaciers, driving melting and likely triggering an acceleration of ice loss.

Credit: Jack Cook, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

The research team, led by Fiamma Straneo, a physical oceanographer at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, found that subtropical waters are reaching Greenland’s glaciers, driving melting and likely triggering an acceleration of ice loss. Melting ice also means more fresh water in the ocean, which could flood into the North Atlantic and disrupt a global system of currents, known as the Ocean Conveyor.

Science Daily quotes Straneo:

This is the first time we’ve seen waters this warm in any of the fjords in Greenland. The subtropical waters are flowing through the fjord very quickly, so they can transport heat and drive melting at the end of the glacier.

The Greenland ice sheet’s contribution to sea level rise over the last decade has doubled due to increased melting and especially to the widespread acceleration of outlet glaciers.

The research teamconducted two extensive surveys during July and September of 2008 in Sermilik Fjord, a 100-kilometer long glacial fjord in East Greenland connecting Helheim Glacier with the Irminger Sea. In 2003 alone, Helheim Glacier retreated several kilometers and almost doubled its flow speed.  Deep inside the fjord, researchers found subtropical water as warm as 39 degrees Fahrenheit (4 degrees Celsius). The team also reconstructed seasonal temperatures on the shelf using data collected by 19 hooded seals tagged with satellite-linked temperature depth-recorders. The data revealed that the shelf waters warm from July to December, and that subtropical waters are present on the shelf year round.

A study published in Nature Geoscience finds that submarine melting is causing Greenland’s glaciers to melt from underneath and calve off.  As the glaciers thin and become unpinned from their moorings on the sea bed, they then flow more rapidly into the sea.

Rates of submarine melting are two orders of magnitude (100 times) larger than surface melt rates. The rate of submarine melting is comparable to rates of iceberg discharge.

Here’s the abstract:

Widespread glacier acceleration has been observed in Greenland in the past few years, associated with the thinning of the lower reaches of the glaciers as they terminate in the ocean. These glaciers thin both at the surface, from warm air temperatures, and along their submerged faces in contact with warm ocean waters. Little is known about the rates of submarine melting and how they may affect glacier dynamics. Here we present measurements of ocean currents, temperature and salinity near the calving fronts of the Eqip Sermia, Kangilerngata Sermia, Sermeq Kujatdleq and Sermeq Avangnardleq glaciers in central West Greenland, as well as ice-front bathymetry and geographical positions. We calculate water-mass and heat budgets that reveal summer submarine melt rates ranging from 0.7±0.2 to 3.9±0.8 m d?¹. These rates of submarine melting are two orders of magnitude larger than surface melt rates, but comparable to rates of iceberg discharge. We conclude that ocean waters melt a considerable, but highly variable, fraction of the calving fronts of glaciers before they disintegrate into icebergs, and suggest that submarine melting must have a profound influence on grounding-line stability and ice-flow dynamics.

The Pine Island glacier in west Antarctica – one of the largest glaciers in Antarctica – is thinning four times faster than it was 10 years ago. Satellite measurements show the surface of the ice is now dropping at a rate of up to 16m a year. At this rate, the glacier could be gone within 100 years.

Scientists fear that the collapse of the Pine Island glacier could lead to a rapid disintegration of the West Antarctic ice sheet (WAIS). Professor Jason Box of Ohio State University said :

It’s like removing a cork from a bottle.

The WAIS is fundamentally far less stable than the Greenland ice sheet because most of it is grounded far below sea level. Its collapse could result in 20-30cm of sea level rise.

Glaciers are rapidly melting in North America, too. A new U.S. Geological Survey report shows the South Cascade Glacier in Washington state has lost nearly half of its volume and a quarter of its mass since 1958. The two others in the study, the Wolverine and Gulkana glaciers in Alaska, have both lost nearly 15% of their mass.

Most of the planet’s glaciers are melting so fast that many will disappear by the middle of the century. The total mass left in the glaciers is now thought to be at the lowest level for thousands of years.

Figures from the World Glacier Monitoring Service for 2005-06 showed the biggest loss of ice in a single year since those records began, and based on historic reconstructions, it was thought to be the worst year for 5,000 years. Although melt rates for 2007 fell substantially from record levels of the previous year, the loss of ice was still the third worst on record. The full report – “Global Glacier Changes: facts and figures” – is available here.

The shrinking and thinning of many glaciers world-wide puts at risk water supplies for hundreds of millions — if not billions — of people. Glaciers may completely disappear from many mountain ranges in the 21st century.

The dramatic extent of glacial melt in the Himalayas is shown in this video by mountaineer and filmmaker David Breashears.

A research team led by Professor Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University has uncovered evidence that the Naimona’nyi glacier high in the Himalayas of Tibet is dwindling faster than anyone thought possible – and it’s not just by receding, it’s being decapitated and losing mass.

Naimona’nyi is the highest glacier (6050 masl) yet found to be losing mass annually, suggesting that other high-elevation glaciers in low and mid-latitudes could experience similar mass loss under a warmer Earth scenario. In 2002 Thompson predicted that the ice fields capping Kilimanjaro would disappear between 2015 and 2020.

Glaciers can be dated by looking for traces of radioactivity buried in the ice. These are the leftovers from US and Soviet atomic bomb testing in the 1950s and 1960s. In the Naimona’nyi samples, there was no sign of the tests – the glacier had melted so much that the exposed surface of the glacier dated to 1944.

Scientists believe that the missing signal means that this Tibetan ice field has been shrinking at least since the A-bomb test half a century ago. Thompson compares glaciers to water towers: they collect water from the monsoon in the wet season and release it in the dry season. Himalayan glaciers store about 12,000 cubic kilometers (2,879 cubic miles) of fresh water – more freshwater than in Lake Superior. Shrinking glaciers mean less fresh water, seriously affecting the Indian subcontinent’s great rivers – the Ganges, Indus, and Brahmaputra – which provide water for more than 500 million people.

The  paper “Mass loss on Himalayan glacier endangers water resources” was authored by  and a team of researchers and published in journal ” Geophysical Research Letters. Articles about the research have appeared at Ohio State Research News, ENN, MSNBC, and Climate Progress.