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Global Glacier Extinction Explorer
- Kapura 21d agoObviously nobody wants this, but if i cant ask my chatbot what it thinks of the texts my wife sends me we'd be lost as a civilization.
- czechdeveloper 21d agoWhy do people like to pretend AI is reason for climate change? Climate change has been problem for way longer.
- lotsofpulp 21d agoThey want a bad guy to implicate that isn’t them and their detached single family home in a suburb with their large cars and vacations involving flights and foreign made toys and out of season fruits and vegetables.
- anon7725 21d agoGood luck selling degrowth to westerners - especially Americans.
- consumer451 21d agoMaybe because when electric vehicles were becoming a thing, it was all: "The grid cannot handle it! You absolute morons!" Now, put "AI" in front of "datacenters," and no such concerns appear in one's feed. To build upon this, datacenters are the fastest growing build-out in history, are extremely fossil-fuel dependent, and nobody seems to care.
- Kapura 21d agoofc it's not the singular reason, but it does feel like the past 3 years have been silicon valley brain geniuses really stepping on the gas w/r/t datacenter buildup instead of using those big brains to figure out how to reduce single use plastics or whatever. like, we know climate change is real. and yet these giant powerhungry buildings, using so much compute they literally cause shortages on the consumer market, are continuously being built to unclear ends.
- maelito 21d agoJust checked the Glacier Blanc in the Massif des Écrins. The map's glacier vector perimeter is completely wrong : the glacier has retreated hundreds of meters already. I hope this is just a map thing, and not the base for these predictions :/
- mitxela 21d agoWe chose this and we're still choosing it right now.
- alangibson 21d agoAgree. It's been my position for a while that we've de facto decided to do nothing to prevent warming and we'll just live with the consequences.
- FLeXMurphy 21d agoStrong agree on this. I don't think I could do nothing any harder than I already am. Could you? Could any of us?
- encomiast 21d agoSome people are clearly doing less nothing: there are activists protesting, formal political action groups, scientists doing research, etc. What isn't as clear is whether any this can actually overcome the huge social and economic structural issues to actually make a dent.
- dryd3n 21d agoWhen I was initially thinking about my personal impact to this, the first thing that came to mind is air-travel. I don't travel much, maybe once a year to see family. I have some friends who fly several times a year to "see the world", being well-traveled is a part of their personality. But I think I may be wrong on flight being a significant contribution. My guess is that we probably all contribute to this mainly through our SP500 index investments, which financially supports a number of companies that directly contribute to global warming. We're "voting with our dollars" as they say. Maybe we can all start picking individual stocks based on environmental values/promises, and less short-term gain. Somehow, I don't think it'll happen.
- CalRobert 21d ago
- a1371 21d agoI don't understand why a glacier would survive longer in the 4°C scenario than 2.5°C but this seems to suggest so.
- Perz1val 21d agoWater has the highest density at 4°C, but I have no idea how that'd relate
- dfdydx 21d agoIt's +4°C (from the average global temperature). The glacier itself won't be at 4°C.
- abdullahkhalids 21d agoThe system is highly non-linear and has a lot of flippable components. For example, average temperature increase will cause the AMOC to collapse which will make parts of Europe cooler (while also increasing extreme weather events). Similar things could happen with whichever glacier you are looking at.
- burkaman 21d agoThe data comes from this paper, I don't immediately see an answer to this question though: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-025-02513-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-025-02513-9. My guess is that the climate is complicated and the planet doesn't warm evenly, so different emissions scenarios might imply different regions warm more quickly. Not all the glaciers on the site survive longer in the +4 scenario, it's only some parts of the world.
- chunky1994 21d agoThat's just an artifact of the graphical display. This paper shows that's not the case (see fig 2): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-025-02513-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-025-02513-9
- cyberax 21d agoMore precipitation in a given area, resulting in more snow accumulating.
- mbty 21d agoOkjökull is considered extinct, yet according to this website it should survive until the 2070s at least? It also gives 2079 for 1.5°C vs. 2075 for 2.7°C (I know that the local dynamic is not the same as the global one, but still).
- tencentshill 21d agoThe data is somewhat outdated: Extinction is defined relative to the initial glacier outlines from the Randolph Glacier Inventory (RGI v6.0): released July 28, 2017.
- snthd 21d agoThe maximum category is "Survives through 2100". Not great, not terrible.
- Aditya_0315 21d agoReviewed this and it is quite impressive. The map adds much more reality to the data as opposed to regular climate maps. The one feature that I think would be awesome to add would be an interactivity layer to the bottom-right panel indicating the extinction years where you can click or hover over the warming period to view the affected glaciers on the map and their numbers.
- tito 21d agoAnother dimension to add is how global warming is uniquely heating up at the 4,500 to 5,500 m elevation mark, coincidentally right where glaciers are (tldr properties of how our atmosphere works and the pollution we put in it ends up being a laser beam at the same height as glaciers form) Paper here: eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/235707/1/NATREVEARTHENVIRON-24-558_-_Pepin_final.pdf 10.1038/s43017-025-00740-4 Pepin, N. et al. (2025). "Elevation-dependent climate change in mountain environments." Nature Reviews Earth & Environment 6(12), 772-788.
- davely 21d agoIn 2004, I visited New Zealand. It was my first international trip as part of a 6 week long geology field camp. One of the coolest experiences was getting to visit the Fox Glacier and Franz Josef Glacier on the South Island. Checking this out, I don't see the Fox Glacier or Franz Josef Glacier specifically listed in the search field, but moving the map around, I was able to find the ice fields. I see that they both will "survive" to 2100, but I wonder in what state. Check out this time lapse video from 2013 to 2018 showing the Franz Josef Glacier's drastic retreat! [3] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Josef_Glacier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Josef_Glacier [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_Glacier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_Glacier [3] https://youtu.be/LUs_20kRHDw?si=k1nJB2z_kn8T--uT&t=17 https://youtu.be/LUs_20kRHDw?si=k1nJB2z_kn8T--uT&t=17
- bix6 21d agoAlso one of my fav experiences skydiving over those glaciers. My teeth were so cold!
- EdwardDiego 21d agoYeah, it doesn't seem to make any of the glaciers in NZ, even when they do have names. Limitation of the data set I guess.
- ourmandave 21d agoThere was an episode of Northern Exposure where an entire frozen mammoth was exposed. Before the main character could report this amazing find to anyone to be preserved in a museum one of the locals dragged it to house and butchered it for steaks.
- deleted 21d ago[deleted]
- consumer451 21d agoAgreed. Assuming that climate change is real, and to add, it is happening faster than nearly all predictions: what are your going to do for yourself, and for you children/nephews and nieces? How do we prepare them?
- tito 21d agoFor anyone here looking to "do something" about global warming...One thing we're working on is how to avert the worst impacts of El Niño, and use that as a way to break open a new conversation about the warming planet. One thing we need help with today is finding any other events at New York Climate Week that are about El Niño to feature on our site: https://elninoready.earth/ https://elninoready.earth/
- tito 21d agoFor anyone here looking to "do something" about global warming...One thing we're working on is how to avert the worst impacts of the 2026 El Niño, and use that as a way to break open a new conversation about the warming planet and what we can do about it. One thing we need help with today is finding any other events at New York Climate Week that are about El Niño to feature on our site: https://elninoready.earth/ https://elninoready.earth/
- tito 21d agoIs anyone here good at building lists of contacts? We're sending out a "Q&A about El Niño" to everyone organizing events at New York Climate Week, with the goal of having them spent 2 minutes talking about El Niño at their event. We have a partial list...could use some help!
- foxglacier 21d agoIt's funny that your kinds of ideas were heresy a decade ago. Back then, we weren't supposed to think there was anything we could do about the effects of global warming in case we started to think mitigation was possible and stopped panicking. I suppose now that's politically permissiable?
- tito 21d agoHmm. If being "politically permissible" has shifted, it's probably away from taking action at all. What's shifted in the other direction is that it's getting too damn hot here and some people are starting to notice.
- deviner7575 21d agoDoesn't work on safari
- kyralis 21d agoWorks for me? What version are you running?
- iconicwing 21d ago[dead]
- dawnerd 21d agoWeird seeing this posted as I’m up in Alaska right now viewing glaciers and being sad about how much they’ve receded.