Glaciers outside the ice sheets are key contributors to sea-level rise and act as essential fresh-water resources in various regions around the world. Glaciers are also important sources of natural hazards, directly impact biodiversity, and have a significant touristic value. Given these crucial societal and environmental roles, having reliable projections on the evolution of these precious ice bodies under changing climatic conditions is of paramount importance.

In this presentation, I will highlight how modelling glacier changes goes hand in hand with rapidly increasing remotely sensed glacier observations and derived products at the global scale (e.g., glacier outlines, surface elevation, ice thickness, surface velocities, and elevation changes). These new observations, combined with ever-increasing computational capacities and novel numerical tools have recently allowed us to transition from modelling a few individual glaciers to now modelling the evolution of glaciers at regional- to global scales while accounting for ice-dynamical processes. Whereas these recent advances are encouraging, I will also highlight the challenges that we are still facing and that we will need to tackle in the coming years to provide more trustworthy glacier evolution projections.

How to cite: Zekollari, H.: Changing glaciers in a changing climate through changing modelling approaches, EGU General Assembly 2023, Vienna, Austria, 23–28 Apr 2023, EGU23-9607, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-9607, 2023.

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, 23–28 Apr 2023, EGU23-4976, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-4976, 2023.