Climate change threatens massive glacier disappearance: UN

SWIZERLAND: The United Nations said Monday that swathes of mountain ranges worldwide risk losing their glaciers by the end of the century if global warming continues at its projected rate.

The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) said in a report that whilst nature has always observed a certain periodic rate of deglaciation, the current trends observed from the Arctic to Central Europe and South America are of a different order.

The report said that glaciers lost on average a mass of more than half a metre water equivalent in the period 1996-2005, which is twice the ice loss of the previous decade (1986-95) and over four times the rate of the period 1976-85.

Geneva, Tuesday, AFP