It's happening faster than we could have imagined and yet the evidence was right before us all the time. The Earth Poles are the fastest warming areas of our planet and both North and South Poles are showing unprecedented rapid warming and melting.
The conclusion of a new study published in Science Express journal shows that most melting of glaciers is caused by humans. While just 25 percent of the melt since the mid-19th century could be linked to human-induced warming — that fraction increased to 69 percent for the period from 1991 to 2010.
The ongoing global glacier retreat is affecting human societies by causing sea-level rise, changing seasonal water availability, and increasing geohazards. Melting glaciers are an icon of anthropogenic climate change. However, glacier response times are typically decades or longer, which implies that the present-day glacier retreat is a mixed response to past and current natural climate variability and current anthropogenic forcing.
The National Park Service has documented the visible changes:
Dr. Jason Box, of the
Dark Snow Project has been documenting the melting of Greenland glaciers. He and his crew have just completed the 2014 summer data gathering and have released this stunning video of real time glacier melting:
According to Dr. Box, that dark material on the ice is a combination of dust, black carbon, and surprisingly, mostly, microbes. They darken the ice creating a decreased albedo effect which causes more rapid melting.