Scientists use pictures to tell warming story

    Researchers from universities in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kansas, Colorado and Florida have written an article -- and provided pictures -- revealing the retreat of various glaciers. In the article, Savor the Cryosphere, published earlier this month by the Geological Society of America, the professors put global warming in perspective:  
    “Repeat photography vividly displays the rapid retreat of glaciers that is characteristic across the planet. This loss of ice has implications to rising sea level, greater susceptibility to dryness in places where people rely upon rivers delivering melt water resources, and to the destruction of natural environmental archives that were held within the ice.”
    The cryosphere is, of course, the portion of Earth that is frozen -- land and sea ice. The speed at which that ice has been melting is tracked by scientists around the world. It is “being caused primarily by warming over those glaciers and ... this warming is, in turn, being caused primarily by the rising (carbon dioxide) CO2  concentrations in the atmosphere,” the authors explain.
    But because most of us don’t visit the cryosphere, we don’t see the change.  So the professors collaborated with Extreme Ice Survey, a nongovernmental organization founded to photograph the retreat of glaciers. Their photographs give us the picture. (Read their research on the Geological Society of America website.)