Before going into the more specific issues that this blog will cover, it is first important to give a summary of what I hope to achieve! This blog will seek to explore the sensitivity of glaciers globally, to both climate change in the past, as well as to the warming of climate today. Alongside this, by looking at how representative of a changing climate glaciers have been both before and now, we can assess the reliability for looking at future shrinking (or growth). The data on changes in glacial mass balance and other indicators of change will be sourced from a range of academic papers, and analyses of different phenomena interpreted in this blog. As well as the use of academic material, a look at how much of this information feeds through to more mainstream and social media and whether it is always correctly interpreted will be taken.
The significance of knowing how glaciers will behave in the future is important, considering the impact that the loss of these environments could have as both a freshwater resource for many people (particularly in Central Asia) and as an important habitat for many different flora and fauna. Knowing how glaciers in the past expanded and shrunk also helps us to reconstruct past environments. As well as this, by knowing the sensitivity of glacial environments to varying degrees of temperature change, we can see how vulnerable they are to our present anthropogenic warming.
A useful resource to initially explore is the University of Zurich’s World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS) report on Global Glacier Changes which provides an accessible set of data on glacial growth and reduction in the long term. By first seeing how trends in glacial growth/reduction have been up to the present day, an appreciation of how significant current reductions are can be made. This blog will aim to move on from this face-value data; and show many important interpretations and academic insights about glacial change!
Figure 1. Global measure of increasing negative mean cumulative specific mass balance as millimetres water equivalent (mm w.e.) over the last few decades. (Zemp et al. 2008)
I saw a talk recently which was heavily critical of studies which claimed that glaciers advanced during the Little Ice Age, and that some of our understanding of cycles in glacier expansion and retreat is due to simply to using running averages....
ReplyDelete