Glaciers

Glacial ice covers 10-11 percent of all land. The majority, almost 90 percent, of Earth's ice mass is in Antarctica, while the Greenland ice cap contains 10 percent of the total global ice mass. Minor glaciers are found in North America in the Arctic, and the Coastal and Rocky Mountain ranges. In South America minor glaciers are found in the Andes while in Europe they are found in the Scandinavian countries and the Alps. The Himalayan Mountains and Southern Alps of New Zealand comprise the remainder of the Earth’s minor glaciers.

According to the National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado, if all glaciers melted today the seas would rise about 70 meters (m).

During the last ice age (when glaciers covered more land area than today) the sea level was about 122 m lower than it is today. At that time, glaciers covered almost one-third of the land.

During the last warm spell, 125,000 years ago, the seas were about 5.5 m higher than they are today. About three million years ago the seas could have been up to 50.3 m higher.

Sparse records indicate that glaciers have been retreating since the early 1800s. In the 1950s measurements began that allow the monitoring of glacial mass balance, reported to the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS), Zurich, Switzerland, and the NSIDC. Although it is difficult to connect specific weather events to global warming, an increase in global temperatures may in turn cause broader changes, including glacial retreat, Arctic shrinkage, and worldwide sea level rise.

Glaciers around the globe continue to melt at high rates. Tentative figures for the year 2007, of the WGMS indicate a loss of average ice thickness of roughly 0.67 meter water equivalent (m w.e.), where the standardized unit m.w.e. takes the different densities of change measurements in ice, firn and snow into account. One meter of ice thickness corresponds to about 0.9 m w.e.
Some glaciers in the European Alps lost up to 2.5 m w.e. The new still tentative data of more than 80 glaciers confirm the global trend of fast ice loss since 1980. Glaciers with long-term observation series (30 glaciers in 9 mountain ranges) have experienced a reduction in total thickness of more than 11 m w.e. (12.2 metres) until 2007. The average annual ice loss during 1980-1999 was roughly 0.3 m w.e. per year. Since 2000, this rate has increased to about 0.7 m w.e. per year.

The record loss during the two decades1980-1999 – 0.7 metres in 1998 – was exceeded in three of the six years between 2002 and 2007.

Billions of people depend directly or indirectly on glaciers as natural water storage facilities for drinking water, agriculture, industry and power generation during key parts of the year.

It is an objective of the current invention to reduce the contribution CO2 makes to glacier melting by sequestering a portion of this greenhouse gas in vegetation planted in irrigated portions of the world’s deserts.