4 Continents, 9 Mountain Ranges, 30 Reference Glaciers - Average Vertical Loss 1 Meter 2007-08

Glaciers across the globe are continuing to melt so fast that many will disappear by the middle of this century, the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS) said today. The announcement of the latest annual results from monitoring in nine mountain ranges on four continents comes as doubts have been cast on how much climate scientists have exaggerated the problem of glacier melt, which is seen as a leading indicator of how much the planet is heating up.

Last week the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) apologised for "a paragraph" in its four-volume 2007 report which warned there was a "very high" risk that the Himalayan glaciers, on which at least half a billion of the world's poorest people depend for water, would disappear by 2035. However the director of the WGMS, Professor Wilfried Haeberli, said the latest global results indicated most glaciers were continuing to melt at historically high rates. "The melting goes on," said Haeberli. "It's less extreme than in years but what's really important is the trend of 10 years or so, and that shows an unbroken acceleration in melting."

EDIT

The WGMS records data for nearly 100 of the world's approximately 160,000 glaciers, including 30 "reference" glaciers, with data going back to at least 1980. Scientists also use methods from geology to photos and travel journals and other data to estimate glacier sizes further back in history. The latest preliminary figures for 2007-08 show the average reduction in thickness across all the 96 glaciers was nearly half a metre, and since 1980 they have collectively lost an average of 13m thickness. During that year 30 of the 96 glaciers gained in mass.

Two years ago the WGMS preliminary figures revealed the biggest melt-rate in one year on record. The figure was later revised so it was slightly less "catastrophic" than the other extreme year in 2002-03, said Haeberli.

EDIT

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jan/25/world-glacier-monitoring-service-figures