It ’s one thing to hear about the impacts of climate change through sensationalist newspaper headline or incomprehensible scientific newspaper , but it ’s quite another to see the profound modification with your own eyes .
A unexampled project by researchers from the University of Dundee , the University of Iceland , and the Iceland Meteorological Office has highlighted the scale of meth loss Iceland ’s glaciers are experiencing by comparing aerial photographs take in the 1980s with present - Clarence Shepard Day Jr. laggard images .
“ It is important to show how mood alteration is physically and visibly affecting the neighborhood . To do this , we developed a fresh cognitive operation base on principles that are used by glaciologists to measure crank - book expiration . This method allows us to compose unequalled aerial views of past landscapes and to see how they have changed over the last 30 to 40 years,”Dr Kieran Baxterfrom the University of Dundee said in an emailed statement .
" While we have a grand resource of mapping photographs from the 1980s , this method acting can also be applied to ethereal photographs that are even older . The archives are huge and we have hardly engrave the open in terms of using them to well show how the thaw clime is unwrap in our landscape painting . "
The work tells the story of the south side of the Vatnajökull ice roof , the large chalk cap in Iceland and the second - gravid in Europe , over the preceding three decades . Beneath the ice cap , you could alsofind several volcano . If these volcano erupt then it can burst the ice and make a glacier outburst flood , or what ’s known in Iceland as ajökulhlaup .
Vatnajökullcovers an area of 7,700 satisfying kilometers ( 4,784 square miles ) , about 8 percent of the country . However , the meth capital has started to show its delicacy . Over the past few decades , scientist have document the ice roof retreating by ten of meters , and in some sphere hundreds of metre , every single year .
The culprit – you guessed it – isclimate alteration . A recent report by theUN ’s IPCCfound that sea and the cryosphere ( the frozen parts of the world , like crank sheets ) have been “ taking the passion ” from climate change , take over over 90 percent of the excess warmth in the climate organisation and up to 30 percent of man - induced carbon dioxide emissions .
As you’re able to see from this recent project , the core of this are already being felt . Republic of Iceland has almost 400 glacier , most of which could be goneby 2200if current spherical warming trends proceed and glasshouse gas emissions persist chequered . The past summertime , Icelandersheld a funeralfor Okjökull in Borgarfjörður , the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier due to mood change .
Recently , Dr Baxter and colleagues recently carried out a similar labor looking at the encroachment that clime change has had on Mont Blanc ’s glaciers on the French - Italian border . you could see the stunning , yet get down , images aright here .
