How many tons a day are the glaciers melting The History Channel said 100s of million of tons per day. Is that possible?

Answer 1

552 billion tons lost from the Greenland ice sheet in 2007.

This is just ONE region. Not the entire globe. Some regions lose for a part of the season and others gain. Some of that ice presumably returns in the winter.

An accurate estimate of ice loss would be critical to figuring how much heat is being absorbed by melting ice relative to the heat gained from solar radiation (the scientific models suggest 4 Watts per square meter of planet surface is enough to create a problem). So the very pertinent question is totally appropriate and an answer is essential for the Anthropogenic Global Warming models.

A:The number of tons does not transmit the reality of the size and extension of the glaciers that are melting and gone.

Arctic sea ice during the 2007 melt season has reached its lowest levels since the beginning of measurements in 1979, this was informed by the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

The average amount of sea ice registered by satellite for the month of September was 4.28 million square kilometers (1.65 million square miles), the lowest in any September record, 23% less ice than in 200.

There is not any considerable gain in sea ice or glaciers anywhere in the world according to official studies and the World Meteorological Organization. The decreasing amount of the ice caps is a cause of concern and is endangering the Arctic and Antarctic environments as well as the sea levels at global scale and the speeding of flooding and eventual destruction of low-lying islands and coastal areas.

Jeffrey Kargel, a glacier expert at the U.S. Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Arizona, stated recently that "Receding and wasting glaciers are a chief telltale sign that global climate change is real and accelerating."

The melt rate of the 160,000 glaciers on Earth, has accelerated dramatically since the mid-1990s. A measured glacier in the Peruvian Andes, Qori Kalis, lost as much ice in one week as it used to lose in one year, reported Lonnie Thompson, a geologist at the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University in Columbus, who in a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science added that "You can literally sit there and watch it retreat. As the Peruvian ice fields disappear, sources of irrigation and hydroelectric power will dry up."

Glaciers are not only decreasing in area but also in thickness. In Alaska, glaciers are losing an average of 6 feet (1.8 meters) of thickness each year according to a report by Anthony Arendt, a glaciologist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. He also predicted that at the present rate, by the middle of this century there will be almost no ice at the Rockies, the Cascades, and Glacier National Park.

Studies based on thousands of aerial photographs and satellite imaging, show that on the past 50 years, 84% of Antarctic glaciers have retreated, said David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey at Cambridge in a report. The average retreat was 1,970 feet (600 meters) since 1953 but there are some glaciers as the Sjogren Glacier that retreated as much as 8 miles (13 kilometers) since 1993.

A small number of glaciers that advanced on average 980 feet (300 meters) in the Antarctic peninsula in the last 50 years, are attributed to the newly created variations and compensation of temperature areas, and are considered as with no impact on the much larger scale and amplitude of the melting and receding glaciers, which is considered of great global impact.

The above official and scientific studies and conclusions, refer to all glaciers, including glacier-ice shelves connected to the land-based glacier from which they flowed, as well as tidewater glaciers that rest on land and break off into the ocean.

Experts in catastrophes and natural disasters have warned that not only the melting of the Arctic and Antarctic glaciers present a global menace but also the melting of glaciers in the Andes and the Himalayas, that feed the main rivers and water supply to large regions, can lead, once the glaciers are gone, to water shortage for hundreds of millions of people, a true global catastrophe.