The vast, shrinking northern glaciers that we never even talk about

By Chris Mooney

We all know that Greenland is losing a lot of ice. If you take NASA’s word for it, it’s currently losing ice mass to the tune of 287 billion tons per year, enough to raise sea levels the better part of a millimeter annually. Overall, it contains enough ice to potentially raise sea levels by as much as 20 feet.

No wonder, then, when it comes to glacial loss and sea level rise, Greenland gets all of the attention (in the Northern Hemisphere, anyway). But as new research suggests, it’s far from the only major ice loser in the region.

We pay far too little attention to two others: the northern and southern glaciers of the Canadian Arctic archipelago. The northern region, centered on Ellesmere Island, contains more glacier mass than any other region in the world (outside of Greenland and Antarctica, that is), and the southern region, centered on the vast Baffin Island, also holds a very large amount of ice.

And they’re both fast losing ice. “If you do an entire inventory of all the glaciers, they actually are changing more than Greenland and Antarctica at the moment, or have been,” says Princeton geoscientist Christopher Harig, who conducted the new study in Geophysical Research Letters along with Princeton’s Frederik Simons.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/03/17/the-vast-shrinking-northern-glaciers-that-we-never-even-talk-about/