Continued Glacier Ice Loss from Alaska’s Juneau Ice Field Now Largely Locked In

Nature Communications, 2 July 2024

The massive Juneau Icefield in Alaska contains more than one thousand glaciers and has rapidly melted over the past decade, shrinking five times faster between 2010-2020 compared to the 1980s. During this period, the volume of glacier ice loss doubled. Alaska’s icefields are particularly vulnerable to climate warming because these glaciers rest on a flat surface, with no room to retreat into higher altitudes. Due to rising air temperatures, widespread ice thinning has now become pervasive across the Juneau Icefield Plateau, driving glacier retreat and fragmentation at extremely fast rates. Glaciers in Alaska represent one of the largest regions of land ice contributing to sea-level rise. As glacier thinning on the Plateau continues, a series of different feedbacks are likely to prevent future glacier regrowth, locking in centuries of sea-level contribution from this vast expanse of ice.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-49269-y