Glaciers are cooling themselves - but not for much longer

Glaciers are doing something unexpected. Even as the planet heats up, these huge slabs of ice are cooling the air that touches them.

In some places, glaciers are even pushing out cold winds that roll down their slopes like a built-in defense system. But this won’t go on forever.

For now, many glaciers are keeping themselves cooler than the air around them, creating their own little zones of chill. But researchers say that window is closing.

Once this natural cooling runs out, the pace of melting will pick up – and there may be no slowing it down.

The last gasp of glacier cooling

In high mountain regions like the Alps and the Himalayas, scientists have noticed that the near-surface temperatures of glaciers aren’t rising as fast as the air above them.

That’s not because the ice is winning the battle against climate change. It’s more like a temporary delay.

A research team looked into how long this cooling effect can hold out. They found that glaciers around the world are likely to hit their peak cooling power sometime in the next 10 to 15 years. After that, the ice won’t be able to resist the warming trend any longer.

Study lead author Thomas Shaw is a postdoctoral researcher in Francesca Pellicciotti’s group at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA).

“The more the climate warms, the more it will trigger the glaciers to cool their own microclimate and local environments down-valley,” said Shaw. “But this effect will not last long, and a trend shift will ensue before the middle of the century.”

Cold winds from the top of the world

Some of the most powerful examples of this cooling effect come from the massive glaciers in the Himalayas. Scientists studying a 16,400-foot-high climate station near Mount Everest were stunned when they first looked at the data.

“Upon examining the data thoroughly, we understood that the glaciers were reacting to the warming air in summer by intensifying their temperature exchange at the surface,” said Francesca Pellicciotti, one of the researchers.

These changes cool large chunks of air, which then slide downhill under gravity in the form of “katabatic winds.”

The katabatic winds aren’t unique to the Himalayas. Other large glaciers across the world show similar behavior. But they all rely on the same basic process: large, cold glaciers chilling the air around them to delay melting.

Building a global model

Understanding how glaciers manage this cooling trick wasn’t easy. Gathering data from remote glaciers in some of the most extreme places on Earth is tough, and most climate models don’t have enough detail to show what’s happening on the ice itself.

To solve that problem, researchers pulled together a huge amount of data.

“We compiled data from past and recent projects across our research group, pooled them with all published data, and reached out to other researchers to request that they share with us their unpublished data,” said Shaw.

In total, the team collected hourly data from 350 weather stations across 62 glaciers. That included 169 summer-long campaigns, tracking how surface temperatures on the glaciers compared to the air just above them.

Limits of the decoupling effect

They found that glacier surfaces warm up by about 0.83 degrees Celsius for every 1 degree of warming in the surrounding air. This gap, called “decoupling,” is what lets glaciers cool themselves temporarily.

The team also looked at what limits this decoupling effect. Glaciers with thick layers of rocks and debris tend to lose their cooling power faster. They used this information to fine-tune a statistical model predicting how long glaciers can keep up this defense.

Their projection shows the cooling effect will likely peak between the 2020s and 2040s. After that, as glaciers lose more ice and become smaller and thinner, they’ll start heating up in step with the atmosphere.

“By then, the worn-out and considerably degraded glaciers will ‘recouple’ to the steadily warming atmosphere, sealing their fate,” said Shaw.

No quick fix for melting glaciers

“Knowing that the glaciers’ self-cooling will continue a little longer could buy us some extra time to optimize our water management plans over the next decades,” said Shaw. But he also made it clear: the world’s mountain glaciers are already committed to serious ice loss. There’s no reversing it.

“We must accept the committed ice loss and put our full efforts into limiting further climatic warming rather than into ineffective geo-engineering strategies such as seeding clouds and covering glaciers. These are like putting an expensive Band-Aid on a bullet wound.”

That’s why the researchers are pushing for action – not just locally, but worldwide. Coordinated climate policies, lower emissions, and long-term water planning are essential.

“Every bit of a degree counts,” said Shaw, repeating a warning scientists have been giving for years.

Glaciers aren’t just chunks of ice – they’re life support systems for millions of people who depend on their meltwater. Their quiet resistance to climate change is running out. What we do next will determine what’s left of them by the time this century ends.

The full study was published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

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