The Greenland Ice Sheet's (GIS) contribution to sea level rise more than doubled in the last seven years due to a surprisingly rapid (and unpredicted) mass loss. The loss was not so much a result of increased surface melt but, rather, of ice loss due to the widespread and nearly-simultaneous acceleration of several outlet glaciers in Greenland’s western and southeastern sectors [Rignot and Kana...

The degree to which debris-covered glaciers record past environmental conditions is debated. Here we describe a novel palaeoclimate archive derived from the surface morphology and internal debris within cold-based debris-covered glaciers in Antarctica. Results show that subtle changes in mass balance impart major changes in the concentration of englacial debris and corresponding surface topogra...

We describe volumetric changes in three benchmark glaciers in the Nepal Himalayas on which observations have been made since the 1970s. Compared with the global mean of glacier mass balance, the Himalayan glaciers showed rapid wastage in the 1970s-1990s, but similar wastage in the last decade. In the last decade, a glacier in an arid climate showed negative but suppressed mass balance compared ...

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 whi...

The Subantarctic island of South Georgia lost most of its birds to predation by rodents introduced by people over  centuries. In  a UK charity began to clear brown rats Rattus norvegicus and house miceMus musculus from the  km long, , km island using helicopters to spread bait containing Brodifacoum as the active ingredient. South Georgia’s larger glaciers were barriers to rodent mo...

Most glaciers in China lie in high mountainous environments and have relatively large surface slopes. Common analyses consider glaciers’ projected areas (2D Area) in a two-dimensional plane, which are much smaller than glacier’s topographic surface extents (3D Area). The areal difference between 2D planar areas and 3D surface extents exceeds −5% when the glacier’s surface slope is larger than 1...

We calculate thinning rates ( ) at the 5800 km2 Stikine Icefield of southeast dt Alaska from stacked digital elevation models (DEMs) acquired between 2000 and 2013/2014, and glacier velocities between 1985 and 2014 from feature tracking on optical image pairs. We find a mass change rate of −3.3 ± 1.1 Gt yr−1 between 2000 and 2014, equivalent to an area-averaged elevation change rate of −0.57 ± ...

Like glaciers throughout the world, tropical glaciers in the northern Andes have retreated during the last century. In this study, the retreat of Andean glaciers in Colombian and Venezuela has been mapped from Landsat and ASTER images acquired between 1984 and 2004. Glacier retreat has been mapped for three glaciated regions in Columbia, the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the Sierra Nevada del C...

Glaciers in China are primarily located in the Tibetan Plateau (TP) and surrounding high mountains. The Chinese Glacier Inventory indicates that there are 46 377 glaciers in western China. Meteorological records indicate that air temperature in western China has risen by 0.28C per decade since 1951, and 1998 was the warmest year; precipitation in the region increased by 5–10% per decade from 19...