Melting of Alaska’s Juneau icefield accelerates, losing snow nearly 5 times faster than in the 1980s
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The melting of Alaska’s Juneau icefield, home to more than 1,000 glaciers, is accelerating. The snow covered area is now shrinking 4.6 times faster than it was in the 1980s, according to a new study.
Researchers meticulously tracked snow levels in the nearly 1,500-square mile icy expanse going back to 1948 with added data back to the 18th century. It slowly shriveled from its peak size at the end of the Little Ice Age around 1850, but then that melt rate sped up about 10 years ago, according to a study in Tuesday’s Nature Communications.
“What’s happening is that as the climate is changing, we’re getting shorter winters and longer summers,” study lead author Bethan Davies, a glaciologist at Newcastle University in England. “We’re having more melt, longer melt season.”
It’s melting so fast that the flow of ice into water from now averages about 50,000 gallons every second, according to study co-author Mauri Pelto, a professor of environmental science at Nichols College in Massachusetts.
Only four Juneau icefield glaciers melted out of existence between 1948 and 2005. But 64 of them disappeared between 2005 and 2019, the study said. Many of the glaciers were too small to name, but one larger one, Antler glacier, “is totally gone,” Pelto said.
An icefield is a collection of glaciers, while an ice sheet is something continent-wide and only two of those remain, in Greenland and Antarctica. The most famous glacier in the Juneau icefield is the Mendenhall Glacier, a tourist hotspot.
read more at apnews.com.
