World's glaciers 'out of balance'

LONDON. April 27. KAZINFORM Earth's glaciers are seriously out of balance with the global climate and are already committed to losing almost 40% of their volume.

That is the assessment of scientists after studying a representative group of 144 small and large glaciers around the world.

Their figures assume no further warming of the climate, BBC News reports.

However, if temperatures continue to rise as models predict, the wastage will be even higher, the team says.

"When we look at the data, we can see that the glaciers are out of balance, meaning the climate has actually changed faster than the changes we've seen in ice area and volume," explained Sebastian Mernild from Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico, US.

"Our data suggests the glaciers will commit about 30% of their area and about 38% of their volume to global sea level rise."

Dr Mernild's group calculates this figure to be on the order of 22cm.

"This will happen in the next decades to centuries," he told BBC News.

Dr Mernild, from the Climate, Ocean, and Sea Ice Modeling (COSIM) Group at Los Alamos, was describing his team's work here at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) meeting in Vienna, Austria.

Read more http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17843648