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I’m not a religious person but it was almost like a spiritual experience getting up close and personal with a glacier for the first time.” “Just being up close and personal with this thing which you think you know, having studied it - but it’s very different when you’re there. I have got no other word for it,” Tweed said. I could feel it move very fractionally - at a snail’s pace - but it was completely awe-inspiring. “When I was doing fieldwork in Iceland years ago, I was lucky enough to get access to an area between the glacier and the bedrock and actually lie down on my back and put my hands on the glacier above me. Remarkably, glacial melt in mountain ranges now contributes more to rising sea levels than either the Greenland or Antarctic ice sheets do.Īhead of a critically important diplomatic summit this month, known as COP26, the world’s leading climate scientists have warned this threat is only likely to intensify in the absence of urgent, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. The scientific journal Nature this year published a paper that found the melting of the world's glaciers has almost doubled in speed over the last two decades. Glaciers are extremely sensitive to climate change, and as hot air melts ice and pushes glaciers into retreat, huge new lakes are appearing in high, often precarious pockets within mountain ranges. In and around the world's highest mountains, glacial lake outburst floods pose a worsening threat to an increasing number of people. And they stretch far, sometimes hitting communities hundreds of kilometers from where they started. They sweep down into valleys with torrents of water. T hey strike rapidly, with little or no warning.