Patagonia glacier melting faster than expected: study
The Perito Moreno Glacier in the Southern Patagonian Ice Field for decades has been wedged securely in a valley. But it's started losing contact with the bedrock below, causing it to shed more ice as it inches backward.
While the glacier only lost an average of 34cm in thickness per year between 2000 and 2019, it shrank between 5.5m and 6.5m per year from 2019 to 2024, according to a study led by the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg's Moritz Koch.
In some areas, the world famous glacier retreated by more than 800m over a five-year span to 2024.
It's a change, illustrated in dramatic time lapse photos since 2020, that highlights "the fragile balance of one of the most well-known glaciers worldwide," write the authors of the study in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.
They expect it to retreat several more kilometres in the next few years.
"We believe that the retreat that we are seeing now, and why it is so extreme in terms of values that we can observe, is because it hasn't been climatically stable for a while now, for over a decade," said Koch.
"Now we see this very delayed response to climate change as it is slowly but surely detaching from this physical pinning point in the central part of the glacier."
Koch and his team did extensive field work to get the data for their calculations. To measure ice thickness, they flew over the glacier in a helicopter with a radar device suspended beneath. They also used sonar on the lake and satellite information from above.
Every year, hundreds of thousands of people visit Glaciar Perito Moreno, which was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1981. It's a site known to "calve" ice chunks that fall into Lake Argentino below.
The basic physics of climate change and glaciers are intuitive: heat melts ice, and global warming means more and faster glacial melting, said Richard Alley, an ice scientist at Pennsylvania State University who was not involved in the study.
But much like a dropped coffee mug, it's harder to predict when and exactly how they're going to break apart.
He said people who deny climate change frequently point to anomalies like Perito Moreno, which for a long time wasn't retreating when most other glaciers were.
Even without climate change, glaciers fluctuate a bit. But if the climate were stable, ordinary accumulation of snow and ice would offset the melting and movement, said Erin Pettit, a glaciologist at Oregon State University who was also not involved in the study.
Glacial melting, especially at the poles, matters because it could cause catastrophic sea level rise, harming and displacing people living in coastal and island areas.
While the changes can be locally spectacular in places like Patagonia, Alley said the bigger concern is using studies like this one to understand "what might happen to the big guys" in Antarctica.
with DPA
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