Centennial glacier retreat as categorical evidence of regional climate change

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Abstract

Glaciers have been retreating almost globally over the past century. An analysis using signal-to-noise ratio as a metric of individual glacier change reveals that glacier retreat constitutes categorical evidence for regional climate change.

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THE 'LITTLE ICE AGE': RE-EVALUATION OF AN EVOLVING CONCEPT

JOHN A. MATTHEWS, KEITH R. BRIFFA (2005)

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Glaciers. Attribution of global glacier mass loss to anthropogenic and natural causes.

Ben Marzeion, J Cogley, Kristin Richter … (2014)

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. Here we show that only 25 ± 35% of the global glacier mass loss during the period from 1851 to 2010 is attributable to anthropogenic causes. Nevertheless, the anthropogenic signal is detectable with high confidence in glacier mass balance observations during 1991 to 2010, and the anthropogenic fraction of global glacier mass loss during that period has increased to 69 ± 24%.

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Time–Scale for Adjustment of Glaciers to Changes in Mass Balance

Ed Waddington, Tómas Jóhannesson, Charles Raymond (1989)

The length of time TM over which a glacier responds to a prior change in climate is investigated with reference to the linearized theory of kinematic waves and to results from numerical models. We show the following: TM may in general be estimated by a volume time-scale describing the time required for a step change in mass balance to supply the volume difference between the initial and final steady states. The factor f in the classical estimate of τM = ƒl/u, where I is glacier length and u is terminus velocity, has a simple geometrical interpretation. Ft is the ratio of thickness change averaged over the full length I to the change at the terminus. Although both u and f relate to dynamic processes local to the terminus zone, the ratio f/u and, therefore, Tm are insensitive to details of the terminus dynamics, in contrast to conclusions derived from some simplified kinematic wave models. A more robust estimate of Tm independent of terminus dynamics is given by TM= h/(–b) where h is a thickness scale for the glacier and –b is the mass-balance rate (negative) at the terminus. We suggest that Tm for mountain glaciers can be substantially less than the 1O2–103 years commonly considered to be theoretically expected.