End of the ice: New Zealand’s vanishing glaciers
Glaciers have drawn people to the west coast for decades. Now the ice is retreating. Is it too late to save them?
When Cliff Goodwin first came to Franz Josef he didn’t know what a glacier was. It was 2001, and Goodwin had been travelling down the length of New Zealand from his hometown Taranaki, doing odd jobs: fruit picking, housekeeping. “I worked until I had $1,000, then I travelled until I had $100,” he says.
Goodwin had been intending to top up his bank account, then go. But soon after arriving in Franz Josef – on the West Coast of the South Island, at the foot of the Southern Alps – he went to see the town’s biggest draw for himself.
Franz Josef Glacier in June 2019.
Photo: RNZ / Tess Brunton
Nearly all of the world s glaciers are losing mass, and at an accelerated pace, according to new research published in the science journal Nature.
Researchers found that New Zealand, for example, showed a record glacier thinning rate of 1.5m a year between 2015 and 2019, a nearly sevenfold increase compared to 2000-2004.
The study provides one of the most wide-ranging overviews yet of ice mass loss from about 220,000 glaciers around the world, a major source of sea level rise.
Using high-resolution imagery from Nasa s Terra satellite from between 2000 and 2019, a group of international scientists found that glaciers, with the exception of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets which were excluded from the study, lost an average of 267 gigatonnes of ice per year.
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Glaciologist Lauren Vargo, Research Fellow at the Antarctic Research Centre, measuring snow and ice melt at Brewster Glacier in 2018. She said the results were no surprise, and some years they had seen even more than 1.5m of ice thickness lost. “We have photo records of this glacier going back to the late 1970s. “It’s not as big as Fox or Franz Josef glaciers – only a couple of kilometres long – but it’s got shorter and thinner by hundreds of metres over these past 40 years.” Brewster glacier was 2.4km long when first measured. As of 2017, it was 1.9km.
VICTORIA UNIVERSITY
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The formation of Antarctic sea ice causes cold, salty water to sink to the sea floor, where it flows away and links to the global oceanic conveyor belt, the thermohaline circulation.
Recent studies reveal surprising changes in the Ross Sea region, a choke-point in ocean circulation. David Williams reports. As the three-masted British ship Erebus sailed south in Antarctic waters with the slightly smaller Terror in January 1841, commander James Clark Ross, the world’s most experienced polar explorer, saw a low white line extending as far as the eye could see. “It presented an extraordinary appearance,” he wrote, “gradually increasing in height, as we got nearer to it, and proving at length to be a perpendicular cliff of ice, between one hundred and fifty feet and two hundred feet above the level of the sea, perfectly flat and level at the top, and without any fissures or promontories on its even seaward face.”