Mountain glacier melt-off to raise sea level by 12 cm by 2100

TORONTO - Melt-off from small mountain glaciers and ice caps will raise global sea levels 12 cm by 2100.

The largest contributors to the projected sea level rise would be glaciers in Arctic Canada, Alaska and landmass-bound glaciers in the Antarctic, according to a new study.

Glaciers in the European Alps, New Zealand, the Caucasus, western Canada and the western US are projected to lose more than 50 percent of their current ice volume, reported the journal Nature Geoscience.

The study modelled volume loss and melt-off from 120,000 mountain glaciers and ice caps and was one of the first to provide detailed projections by region, according to a University of British Columbia, Canada, statement.

Currently, melt-off from smaller mountain glaciers and ice caps is responsible for a disproportionately large portion of sea level increases, even though they contain less than one percent of all water on Earth-bound glacier ice.

“There is a lot of focus on the large ice sheets but very few global scale studies quantifying how much melt-off to expect from these smaller glaciers that make up about 40 percent of the entire sea level rise that we observe right now,” said Valentina Radic.

Radic is a postdoctoral researcher with the department of earth and ocean sciences of the university who led the study.

Increases in sea levels caused by the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, and the thermal expansion of water, were excluded from the results.

Radic and colleague Regine Hock at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, modelled future glacier melt-off based on temperature and precipitation projections from 10 global climate models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

“While the overall sea level increase projections in our study are on par with IPCC studies, our results are more detailed and regionally resolved,” said Radic.