The Klinaklini Glacier is the largest glacier in western North America outside of Alaska, but it is shrinking. These two #Landsat images from Sept. 26, 1984 and Sept. 22, 2023 show how the glacier retreated northward more than 3 miles (5 kilometers).

It is also getting skinnier. The ASTER (Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer) on NASA”s Terra satellite shows that klinaklini’s main stem thinned by over 650 feet (nearly 200 meters) between 2000 and 2019. And it’s not alone.

Decades of satellite images of western Canada make it clear that the region’s glaciers are shrinking and that the rate of ice loss is accelerating. Scientific analysis found that rising temperatures and increases in rainfall, rather than snowfall, in the area are fueling the ice losses.

This is a trend that is being seen across the planet. According to one recent estimate, glaciers, excluding the ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica, lost an average of 267 gigatons of mass per year between 2000 and 2019, equivalent to 21 percent of the observed sea level rise during that period.

Video Description:
Alternates between two satellite views of Klinaklini Glacier 39 years apart. The first image shows white snow and ice covered areas that look like branches on the left side of the image. In the middle of the image are lines of dark gray and white that create a slow wave. This is the Klinaklini Glacier. At the top of the image is an area where two of this ice rivers meet, like a zipper. At the bottom of the image, the glacier line fades into a dark green. On the right side of the image, it is primarily shades of green uneven terrain. There is a bit of ice and snow covered areas closer to the glacier. In the second image, the look is similar, except most of the snow and ice covered areas now show a light gray and brown rocky terrain as it melted away. The glacier now only goes to the middle of the image before it changes to a light green color labeled as the glacial lake. There are also small white dots in the lake that are icebergs.

#NASA #ClimateChange #Earth #EarthFromSpace