An international team of researchers has made an ominous discovery: our planet's glaciers are melting at even more alarming rates than previously predicted, in large part due to human-driven climate change.

As detailed in a paper published in the journal Nature, the team estimated that ice loss accelerated from about 255 billion tons a year between 2000 and 2011 to 346 billion tons annually between 2012 and 2023. And the recent years from 2019 to 2023 represented the largest annual ice loss, averaging more than 440 billion tons a year — and setting a new record in 2023 by losing 604 billion tons of ice.

"To put this in perspective, the 273 billion tonnes of ice lost in one single year amounts to what the entire global population consumes in 30 years, assuming three liters per person and day," said University of Zurich professor and coauthor Michael Zemp in a statement.

In short, this is the terrifying new reality of the climate.

"The thing that people should be aware of and perhaps worried about is that yes, the glaciers are indeed retreating and disappearing as we said they would," Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland glaciologist and coauthor William Colgan told the Associated Press. "The rate of that loss seems to be accelerating."

The rate of acceleration is even higher than the most recent assessment by the United Nations IPCC climate panel, as Agence France-Presse reports.

"Hence, we are facing higher sea-level rise until the end of this century than expected before," Zemp told the outlet.

Many small glaciers "will not survive the present century," he added.

The biggest losses were recorded in Alaska, where ice retreated at the fastest rate of any of the 19 regions the researchers studied around the world. Glaciers in central Europe also lost a whopping 39 percent of their ice compared to 2000 levels, with scientists now worrying that many of the Alps' glaciers could eventually disappear altogether.

"Glaciers are apolitical and unbiased sentinels of climate change, and their decline paints a clear picture of accelerated warming," Simon Fraser University Earth Sciences professor Gwenn Flowers told the AP, "and their decline paints a clear picture of accelerated warming."

Unsurprisingly, the culprit is humanity's extremely harmful treatment of the environment.

"It’s due to greenhouse gas increases caused directly by coal, oil, and natural gas burning," University of Colorado ice scientist Ted Scambos, who was not involved in the study, told the AP. "No amount of rhetoric, tweeting, or proclamation will change that."

And unfortunately, we're headed in the wrong direction, with president Donald Trump's "drill, baby, drill," mantra expected to result in the ramping up of fossil fuel extraction and burning.

The renewed plans shocked even oil and gas executives, and could greatly undermine the United States' contributions to cutting carbon emissions.

Researchers have warned that the Earth's glaciers are facing a point of no return. For instance, scientists found last year that the Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica has experienced an irreversible retreat.

While we've long known that glacier loss is accelerating, the latest study suggests the situation is even worse than we thought.

"If you’re losing 5.5 percent of the global ice volume in just over 20 years, clearly that’s not sustainable," Colgan told the AP. "That's going to catch up with you."

For humanity to survive, "you have to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions, it is as simple and as complicated as that," Zemp told the AFP. "Every tenth of a degree warming that we avoid saves us money, saves us lives, saves us problems."

More on glaciers: Scientists Horrified by What They Found Under the Doomsday Glacier


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