If the world reaches 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, 50 per cent of the glaciers would disappear and contribute 9 cm to sea level rise by 2100, as per a study published in the journal Science.
If the world reaches 2.7 degrees of warming — the estimated temperature increase based on climate pledges made at the Conference of Parties (COP26) of the UN Framework Convention for Climate Change — nearly all glaciers in Central Europe, western Canada, and the US (including Alaska) will have melted.
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Ice shelves in Antarctica, such as the Getz Ice Shelf (seen in picture), are sensitive to warming ocean temperatures. Ocean and atmospheric conditions are some of the drivers of ice sheet loss that scientists considered in this new study.
Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, US, modelled glaciers around the world — not counting the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets — to predict how they will be affected by global temperature increases of 1.5 to 4 degrees Celsius (2.7 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels.