Prize bolsters environmental sciences

overshoot may go undetected – increasing the ecological deficit and reducing nature's capacity to meet society's needs. " The Ecological Footprint is a resource accounting tool used to address underlying sustainability questions " , the researchers say. It measures the extent to which humans are using nature's resources faster than they can regenerate. It can illustrate who uses how much of which ecological resources and populations can be defined either geographically or socially. And it shows to what extent humans dominate the biosphere at the expense of wild species. And another report, published last month, reveals how our bank of water resources is dwindling. A study of the world's glaciers and ice caps has revealed that the rate of melting across the world has accelerated in recent years. The loss of glaciers in South America and Asia will threaten the water supplies of millions of people within a few decades, the researchers warn. Loss of land-based frozen water is one of the clearest signs of global temperature rise, and the state of glaciers has become a key argument in the debate over climate change. Georg Kaser, a glaciologist at the University of Innsbruck, who led the research said: " The glaciers are going to melt and melt until they are all gone. There are not any glaciers getting bigger any more. " Kaser said that " 99.9 per cent of all glaciers " were now shrinking. Increased winter snowfall meant that a few, most notably in New Zealand and Norway, got bigger during the 1990s, he said, but a succession of very warm summers since then had reversed the trend. His team combined different sets of measurements which used stakes and holes drilled into the ice to record the change in mass of more than 300 glaciers since the 1940s. They extrapolated these results to cover thousands of smaller and remote glaciers not directly surveyed. The results revealed that the world's glaciers and ice caps — defined as all land-based ice except Greenland and the West Antarctic ice sheets — grew steadily until about 1970, when they began to shrink. The rate of shrinking increased significantly in 2001. On average, the world's glaciers and ice caps lost enough water between 1961 and 1990 to raise global sea levels by 0.35– 0.4 mm each year. For 2001–2004, the figure rose to 0.8 mm each year. Writing in the journal Geophysical Research …