Glaciers are melting. It’s a fact. In terms of global warming, the guilt rests with us. We already saw how many of Switzerland’s glaciers are disappearing. Unfortunately, they are not alone.
Pedro Skvarca, glaciologist from Argentina in Antarctica, witnessed the progressive retreating of glaciers from the White Continent in the last ten years.
This Antarctica summer the glacier Bahía del Diablo, in Vega island, near Antarctica Peninsula, suffered a strong retraction.
Skvarca began to study the movement of this glacier 20 year ago, and in the last 10 years its ice has been decreasing rapidly. He is the head of glaciology division of the Argentine Antarctica Institute, on Base Marambio, an Argentinean base there.
“We watched tremendous ablation, something really unusual”, said Skvarca to La Nación. “Last year I had a box with a thermometer over the ice, this year I found it half meter in the air, hanging from a wire”.
Bahía del Diablo is the only glacier in which measurements have been taken in the past. The scientist measure the difference between the ice added during the winter, and the ice lost in the summer.
“This is important, because if we make a balance of all world’s glaciers we have a clear sign that we are in a time of atmospheric warming. The glaciers are the more clear indicators of climate change”, Skvarca explain.
Image: Flickr
