Ophélie Artaud 3:26 p.m., January 09, 2023

While 2022 is the hottest year ever measured in France, the planet's 215,000 glaciers continue to melt faster and faster.

According to a study, more than half of them will disappear by 2100. But what would be the consequences of this melting ice?

More than 100,000 glaciers are doomed to disappear by 2100. This is the alarming finding of a study by a team of international glaciologists and published in the journal

Science.

Some glaciers, especially smaller ones, will inevitably disappear.

Obviously, global warming is the main cause and the melting of the ice, but their disappearance could also have dramatic consequences everywhere in the world, for animals, humans but also for the climate.

In the worst case, almost all the glaciers could disappear

To arrive at this conclusion, glaciologists have established several scenarios.

The first follows the recommendations of the Paris climate agreement which plans to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees.

In this case, 49% of the world's ice extents will disappear by 2100. The second scenario, much more pessimistic, predicts a temperature increase of 4 degrees.

But this time, 83% of the glaciers could disappear.

Except that the presence of ice is necessary for the planet: their melting could considerably reduce the reserves of drinking water, increase the level of the oceans and modify the temperature of the waters.

This would therefore also have devastating consequences for marine biodiversity.

On land, melting sea ice is already weakening animal life, forcing certain species to migrate and accentuating the disappearance of species already in danger, such as polar bears and emperor penguins.

But the melting of glaciers could also aggravate climate problems.

The risks of flooding would be higher, and the heat waves even more extreme and devastating, due to the lack of drinking water and the absence of expanses of ice to cool the atmosphere.

Reduce global warming

Another consequence, a little less known, concerns their albedo.

Ice is the most effective terrestrial element to reflect the energy received by the sun and send it back to the atmosphere.

Without it, global warming could get worse.

But according to the glaciologists of the journal

Science

, it would still be possible to slow down the phenomenon.

There is only one solution for this: fight against global warming, by reducing our consumption of fossil fuels and limiting deforestation, as quickly as possible.