The amount of ice flowing from the Antarctic glacier has doubled in the span of three decades, and scientists think it could undergo even more dramatic changes in the near future.
The icefields of Patagonia, located at the southern end of South America, are the largest masses of ice in the temperate Southern Hemisphere (approximately 55,000 square kilometers).
This pair of images shows the retreat of the Sermersuaq (Humboldt) Glacier in northwestern Greenland between 2000 and 2008. Sermersuaq Glacier is the widest tidewater glacier in the Northern Hemisphere.
NIWA scientists stated that this glacier had retreated by 5 kilometers (about 3 miles) over the previous three decades. They also stated that New Zealand glaciers on the whole had lost 5.8 cubic kilometers (roughly 1.4 cubic miles) over the same time period.
Where once two streams of ice merged in Greenland’s Jakobshavn Glacier, today there is division and a complex surface riddled with crevasses and melt ponds.