Community estimate of global glacier mass changes from 2000 to 2023
Abstract
Abstract Glaciers are indicators of ongoing anthropogenic climate change1. Their melting leads to increased local geohazards2, and impacts marine3 and terrestrial4,5 ecosystems, regional freshwater resources6, and both global water and energy cycles7,8. Together with the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, glaciers are essential drivers of present9,10 and future11–13 sea-level rise. Previous assessments of global glacier mass changes have been hampered by spatial and temporal limitations and the heterogeneity of existing data series14–16. Here we show in an intercomparison exercise that glaciers worldwide lost 273 ± 16 gigatonnes in mass annually from 2000 to 2023, with an increase of 36 ± 10% from the first (2000–2011) to the second (2012–2023) half of the period. Since 2000, glaciers have lost between 2% and 39% of their ice regionally and about 5% globally. Glacier mass loss is about 18% larger than the loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet and more than twice that from the Antarctic Ice Sheet17. Our results arise from a scientific community effort to collect, homogenize, combine and analyse glacier mass changes from in situ and remote-sensing observations. Although our estimates are in agreement with findings from previous assessments14–16 at a global scale, we found some large regional deviations owing to systematic differences among observation methods. Our results provide a refined baseline for better understanding observational differences and for calibrating model ensembles12,16,18, which will help to narrow projection uncertainty for the twenty-first century11,12,18.
Article Details
Authors (58)
Michael Zemp
Livia Jakob
Inés Dussaillant
Samuel U. Nussbaumer
Noel Gourmelen
Sophie Dubber
Geruo A
Sahra Abdullahi
Liss Marie Andreassen
Etienne Berthier
Atanu Bhattacharya
Alejandro Blazquez
Laura F. Boehm Vock
Tobias Bolch
Jason Box
Matthias H. Braun
Fanny Brun
Eric Cicero
William Colgan
Nicolas Eckert
Daniel Farinotti
Caitlyn Florentine
Dana Floricioiu
Alex Gardner
Christopher Harig
Javed Hassan
Romain Hugonnet
Matthias Huss
Tómas Jóhannesson
Chia-Chun Angela Liang
Chang-Qing Ke
Shfaqat Abbas Khan
Owen King
Marin Kneib
Lukas Krieger
Fabien Maussion
Enrico Mattea
Robert McNabb
Brian Menounos
Evan Miles
Geir Moholdt
Johan Nilsson
Finnur Pálsson
Julia Pfeffer
Livia Piermattei
Stephen Plummer
Andreas Richter
Ingo Sasgen
Lilian Schuster
Thorsten Seehaus
Xiaoyi Shen
Christian Sommer
Tyler Sutterley
Désirée Treichler
Isabella Velicogna
Bert Wouters
Harry Zekollari
Whyjay Zheng