From the tongue of the Mer de Glace to the world’s glaciers : 20 years of progress in measuring glacier mass changes from space
- 1LEGOS/CNRS, Toulouse, France (etienne.berthier@legos.obs-mip.fr)
- 2National Land Survey of Iceland, 16-18 Stillholt, 300 Akranes, Iceland
- 3LEGOS/CNES, 31400 Toulouse, France
- 4IGE, Université Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, IRD, Grenoble INP, Grenoble, France
- 5Instituto Pirenaico de Ecología (CSIC), Zaragoza, Spain
- 6Department of Geography, University of Zurich, Zurich, 8057, Switzerland
- 7EUMETSAT, Darmstadt, Germany
- 8University of Washington, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Seattle, WA, USA
In 2004, we painstakingly measured the thinning of a single glacier tongue (the Mer de Glace, Mont-Blanc) from pairs of SPOT (CNES) satellite optical stereo-images. It then took us nearly 20 years before we managed to up-scale such observations to the global scale. In this presentation, I will illustrate the advances (in terms of data availability and processing) and all the collaborative work that led to a spatially-resolved and almost complete estimation of mass changes for the more than 200,000 glaciers on Earth. These new data paint a global picture of accelerating glacier mass loss since 2000 and pave the way toward improved projections of future glacier mass and sea level contribution.
How to cite: Berthier, E., Belart, J., Blazquez, A., Brun, F., Deschamps-Berger, C., Dussaillant, I., Flament, T., and Hugonnet, R.: From the tongue of the Mer de Glace to the world’s glaciers : 20 years of progress in measuring glacier mass changes from space, EGU General Assembly 2023, Vienna, Austria, 24–28 Apr 2023, EGU23-4976, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-4976, 2023.
