Study: Canadian Glaciers to Disappear by 2100

The disappearance will not only have an environmental impact, but will hurt Canadian tourism.

Canada’s ice caps and glaciers are vanishing, and there might not be much time left to make a change, according to a new study reported by Nature Geoscience. These glaciers not only serve as tourist destinations, but they also provide drinking water to two nations and a bottling company. This study used computer monitoring and models to estimate how fast the caps would melt, and the results were staggering even to the scientists: in less than 85 years, they /4/be completely gone.

This study focused in on the Rocky Mountains in Alberta, Canada, but the scientists say that the same thing could happen to many of the other mountains and glaciers in the area. This specific region includes the Columbia Icefield in Jasper National Park, which is visited by more than 1 million people every year. Rocky Mountain glaciers also feed meltwater into the Columbia River, which flows through Canada and the United States and provides drinking and irrigation water. A lack of water could also impact farming and industry in the area.

“Over the next century, there is going to be a huge loss,” said lead study author Garry Clarke, a glaciologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. “The glaciers are telling us that we’re changing the climate.”

While some glaciers that are further north will fare better, they will still see extreme melt. Though they haven’t yet studied other mountain ranges in the world, they are fearing for the worst. “The method can be applied to glaciers anywhere in the world,” Clarke said. “I think the big, truly serious problems are in Central Asia and South America, and we’d very much like to transfer this methodology to other [regions],” he said.