CLIMATE MATTERS: Receding glaciers in the Arctic will lead to warmer Arizona - KVOA Tucson News
CLIMATE MATTERS: Receding glaciers in the Arctic will lead to warmer Arizona | Climate Matters | kvoa.com
TUCSON, Ariz. (KVOA) — We have heard a lot about glaciers receding over the last couple of decades due to warmer temperatures.
There will still be glaciers on our planet 10 years from now and even a hundred years from now, but that doesn't change the fact that we are in a warming pattern, and they are getting smaller.
With that recession, we could see some changes that would even impact some of us that live in Arizona.
Most of the impacts we would have in our state would be indirect. More people would move to an area like Tucson to get away from the coastlines.
We would also have a tough time visiting Rocky Point for vacations if sea levels rise due to glaciers receding.
Ed Beshore has lived in Arizona for a while but has lived in the Pacific Northwest, and he went back to visit recently and noticed the recession at one of his favorite spots.
"I spent a lot of time on Mount Rainier," he said. "There was an area on the north side called the Carbon Glacier. I used to visit it regularly. About 25 years later, my wife and I went back to see it, and we were shocked that it had receded by about a mile."
Glaciers throughout most of the world have lost between 5% and 10% of their total length just in the past 20 years.
In Greenland, however, that loss has been over 15% in that same time. Alaska is another spot that has lost a ton of ice over these last couple of decades as well.
"We went to the Columbia glacier in Alaska," Beshore said, "and that one receded 12 km."
It is worth noting that ice has been receding for the past 20,000 years since the last ice age, but it has begun to speed up a little more in recent decades.
This is also significant to us here in Southern Arizona because with less ice near the poles, that means we can expect more warming in areas like the Sonoran Desert at a faster rate.
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Related Knowledge Center: Climate science
What began as a theory in the 1890s — that industrial emissions of carbon dioxide could increase global temperatures — had progressed to a scientific fact a century later. Scientists across a range of disciplines are studying the impact of the still-growing concentration of carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere as they call for industrial and governmental policies to slow, then halt, the warming of the planet.