Regional Assessments of Glacier Mass
In this image, which serves as Figure 4-8 in the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the size of the green circles depicts total area covered by glaciers in each region with the tidewater basin fractions [TW] shown separately in blue. The Randolph Glacier Inventory (RGI) regions, designated by the white number, are referenced in Table 4.2 in the IPCC report. The geographic locations of all glaciers, evident primarily in mountainous regions and high latitudes, are shown in yellow with their area increased to improve visibility. Glacier locations and areas were obtained from airborne and Landsat ETM+, ASTER or SPOT5 satellite imagery and are from the Randolph Glacier Inventory Version 2.0 (Arendt et al., 2012).
For additional information, refer to the paper available here.
Global distribution of glaciers (yellow) and area covered (size of the circle), sub-divided into the 19 RGI regions (white number) referenced in Table 4.2 of the IPCC report. The area portion covered by tidewater terminating (TW) glaciers in each region is shown in blue.
Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio
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Visualizer
- Cindy Starr (Global Science and Technology, Inc.)
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Scientists
- Alex S Gardner (Graduate School of Geography, Clark University)
- Georg Kaser (Institut für Meteorologie und Geophysik, Universität Innsbruck)
- Anthony A Arendt (Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska)
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Project support
- Laurence Schuler (ADNET Systems, Inc.)
- Ian Jones (ADNET Systems, Inc.)
Release date
This page was originally published on Friday, November 29, 2013.
This page was last updated on Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 1:51 PM EDT.
Related papers
Gardner, A. S., et al., 2013, A Consensus Estimate of Glacier Contributions to Sea Level Rise: 2003 to 2009, Science, Vol. 340 no. 6134 pp. 852-857.
Gardner, A. S., et al., 2013, A Consensus Estimate of Glacier Contributions to Sea Level Rise: 2003 to 2009, Science, Vol. 340 no. 6134 pp. 852-857.
Datasets used
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Glacier Area by Region: Randolph Glacier Inventory 3.0 (Arendt et al., 2012)
ID: 779
Note: While we identify the data sets used on this page, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.