Climate change lays waste to Spain's glaciers—Spain loses 90% of its glaciers…threatening drought…

Climate change lays waste to Spain's glaciers

Spain loses 90% of its glaciers thanks to global warming, threatening drought as rivers dry up

Giles Tremlett
guardian.co.uk, Monday 23 February 2009 17.28 GMT

The Pyrenees mountains have lost almost 90% of their glacier ice over the past century, according to scientists who warn that global warning means they will disappear completely within a few decades.

While glaciers covered 3,300 hectares of land on the mountain range that divides Spain and France at the turn of the last century, only 390 hectares remain, according to Spain's environment ministry.

The most southerly glaciers in Europe are losing the battle against warming and look set to be among the first to disappear from the continent over the coming decades. Their loss will have a severe impact on summer water supplies in the foothills and southern plains south of the Pyrenees.

"This century could see (perhaps within a few decades) the total, or almost total, disappearance of the last reserves of ice in the Spanish Pyrenees and, as a result, a major change in the current nature of upper reaches of the mountains," the authors of the report on Spain's glaciers said.

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The corresponding annual and cumulative mass balance results of this data set from glaciers in the Americas and Eurasia are visualized in the following two figures:


Figure 1: Mean annual specific mass balance of reference glaciers. http://www.geo.uzh.ch/wgms/mbb/mbb10/Abb1.pdf">pdf


Figure 2: Mean cumulative specific mass balance of all reported glaciers (black line) and the reference glaciers (red line).http://www.geo.uzh.ch/wgms/mbb/mbb10/Abb2.pdf">pdf


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