Earth’s glaciers are melting faster than ever before

I recently read an article about the rise of “last-chance tourism” at the famous Mer de Glace, the largest glacier in the French Alps. A site that people would have once visited to take in its sheer grandeur and beauty now attracts crowds for a different reason: it’s rapidly disappearing.

Massive landforms of ice and snow like Mer de Glace may seem like they would be impervious to the slight global temperature changes we’ve seen over the past few decades. In reality, glaciers can be incredibly sensitive to warming trends; in fact, over the past decade, glacier losses were more than one third higher than during 2000-2011. The loss of mountain glaciers has the potential to detrimentally impact the surrounding regions, as meltwater runoff could lead to flooding and key water resources are stripped away. The Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets are the only two permanent ice sheets on Earth — but even they aren’t safe. The Greenland ice sheet loses about 33 million tons of ice per hour, reflecting an accelerated loss of mass due to climate change.

Why should we care? Melting glaciers have accounted for 21% of total sea level rise over the past two decades. Recent studies found that the complete melting of the Greenland ice sheet would cause sea levels to rise by about 7 meters. An increase as extreme as this — or even just a fractional change — would devastate coastal communities, infrastructure, and ecosystems, and drastically alter global oceanic and atmospheric patterns.

Climate change is a source of intense anxiety for many people. The question of how far we can push our planet before the damage becomes irreversible remains largely unanswered; but according to recent research, clues could lie in the snowy regions at the poles.

A climate model created to simulate future melting of the Greenland ice sheet found that a “tipping point” — a state where irreversible collapse is imminent — would occur once global temperatures reached 3.4 C above pre-industrial levels. This scenario may have seemed avoidable a few years ago. But with the United States, the world’s second largest carbon emitter, pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement under Republican President Donald Trump, our planet’s outlook has changed.

The Paris Agreement united nearly every country in the world under the ambitious common goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels. Already, the world is not on track to meet this goal, having experienced the hottest year in human history in 2024. In order to even have a hope of keeping warming trends around the 1.5 C mark, all of the top global greenhouse gas contributors would need to accelerate their clean energy transitions and cut back on fossil fuel emissions. However, the Trump administration’s withdrawal of the U.S. from the Paris Agreement and attempts to bolster the fossil fuel industry might just be enough to push Earth’s ice sheets — and humanity itself — to their tipping point.

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Norah Findley is a freshman studying Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania.