A new study says the melting of Alaska’s Juneau icefield is accelerating. The snow covered area is now shrinking 4.6 times faster than it was in the 1980s.
The melting of Alaska's Juneau icefield, home to more than 1,000 glaciers, is accelerating. The snow-covered area is now shrinking 4.6 times faster than it was in the 1980s, according to a new study. Researchers meticulously tracked snow levels in the nearly 1,500-square mile icy expanse going back to 1948 with added data back to the 18th century.
An icefield is a collection of glaciers, while an ice sheet is something continent-wide and only two of those remain, in Greenland and Antarctica. The most famous glacier in the Juneau icefield is the Mendenhall Glacier, a tourist hotspot. The Arctic is warming about four times faster than the rest of the globe with Alaska warming 2.6 degrees since 1980, according to federal weather data.
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Melting of Alaska's Juneau icefield accelerates, losing snow nearly 5 times faster than in the 1980sA new study says the melting of Alaska’s Juneau icefield, home to more than 1,000 glaciers, is accelerating. The snow covered area is now shrinking 4.6 times faster than it was in the 1980s. Tuesday's study finds that it was slowly losing snow since the 18th century, but then that melt rate sped up about 10 years ago.
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