Global Glacier Extinction Explorer | Hacker News Reader

Global Glacier Extinction Explorer

glacierextinction.com

159 pointsguillego64 comments

In 2004, I visited New Zealand. It was my first international trip as part of a 6 week long geology field camp. One of the coolest experiences was getting to visit the Fox Glacier and Franz Josef Glacier on the South Island.

Checking this out, I don't see the Fox Glacier or Franz Josef Glacier specifically listed in the search field, but moving the map around, I was able to find the ice fields.

I see that they both will "survive" to 2100, but I wonder in what state. Check out this time lapse video from 2013 to 2018 showing the Franz Josef Glacier's drastic retreat! [3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Josef_Glacier

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_Glacier

[3] https://youtu.be/LUs_20kRHDw?si=k1nJB2z_kn8T--uT&t=17

Also one of my fav experiences skydiving over those glaciers. My teeth were so cold!

Yeah, it doesn't seem to make any of the glaciers in NZ, even when they do have names.

Limitation of the data set I guess.

Reviewed this and it is quite impressive. The map adds much more reality to the data as opposed to regular climate maps. The one feature that I think would be awesome to add would be an interactivity layer to the bottom-right panel indicating the extinction years where you can click or hover over the warming period to view the affected glaciers on the map and their numbers.

I don't understand why a glacier would survive longer in the 4°C scenario than 2.5°C but this seems to suggest so.

Water has the highest density at 4°C, but I have no idea how that'd relate

It's +4°C (from the average global temperature). The glacier itself won't be at 4°C.

The system is highly non-linear and has a lot of flippable components. For example, average temperature increase will cause the AMOC to collapse which will make parts of Europe cooler (while also increasing extreme weather events).

Similar things could happen with whichever glacier you are looking at.

The data comes from this paper, I don't immediately see an answer to this question though: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-025-02513-9. My guess is that the climate is complicated and the planet doesn't warm evenly, so different emissions scenarios might imply different regions warm more quickly. Not all the glaciers on the site survive longer in the +4 scenario, it's only some parts of the world.

That's just an artifact of the graphical display. This paper shows that's not the case (see fig 2): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-025-02513-9

More precipitation in a given area, resulting in more snow accumulating.

There was an episode of Northern Exposure where an entire frozen mammoth was exposed. Before the main character could report this amazing find to anyone to be preserved in a museum one of the locals dragged it to house and butchered it for steaks.

Okjökull is considered extinct, yet according to this website it should survive until the 2070s at least? It also gives 2079 for 1.5°C vs. 2075 for 2.7°C (I know that the local dynamic is not the same as the global one, but still).

The data is somewhat outdated: Extinction is defined relative to the initial glacier outlines from the Randolph Glacier Inventory (RGI v6.0): released July 28, 2017.

Just checked the Glacier Blanc in the Massif des Écrins. The map's glacier vector perimeter is completely wrong : the glacier has retreated hundreds of meters already.

I hope this is just a map thing, and not the base for these predictions :/

Weird seeing this posted as I’m up in Alaska right now viewing glaciers and being sad about how much they’ve receded.

Doesn't work on safari

Works for me? What version are you running?

Obviously nobody wants this, but if i cant ask my chatbot what it thinks of the texts my wife sends me we'd be lost as a civilization.

Why do people like to pretend AI is reason for climate change?

Climate change has been problem for way longer.

They want a bad guy to implicate that isn’t them and their detached single family home in a suburb with their large cars and vacations involving flights and foreign made toys and out of season fruits and vegetables.

Good luck selling degrowth to westerners - especially Americans.

Maybe because when electric vehicles were becoming a thing, it was all: "The grid cannot handle it! You absolute morons!"

Now, put "AI" in front of "datacenters," and no such concerns appear in one's feed.

To build upon this, datacenters are the fastest growing build-out in history, are extremely fossil-fuel dependent, and nobody seems to care.

ofc it's not the singular reason, but it does feel like the past 3 years have been silicon valley brain geniuses really stepping on the gas w/r/t datacenter buildup instead of using those big brains to figure out how to reduce single use plastics or whatever. like, we know climate change is real. and yet these giant powerhungry buildings, using so much compute they literally cause shortages on the consumer market, are continuously being built to unclear ends.

Another dimension to add is how global warming is uniquely heating up at the 4,500 to 5,500 m elevation mark, coincidentally right where glaciers are

(tldr properties of how our atmosphere works and the pollution we put in it ends up being a laser beam at the same height as glaciers form)

Paper here: eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/235707/1/NATREVEARTHENVIRON-24-558_-_Pepin_final.pdf

10.1038/s43017-025-00740-4

Pepin, N. et al. (2025). "Elevation-dependent climate change in mountain environments." Nature Reviews Earth & Environment 6(12), 772-788.

The maximum category is "Survives through 2100". Not great, not terrible.

We chose this and we're still choosing it right now.

Agree. It's been my position for a while that we've de facto decided to do nothing to prevent warming and we'll just live with the consequences.

Strong agree on this. I don't think I could do nothing any harder than I already am. Could you? Could any of us?

Some people are clearly doing less nothing: there are activists protesting, formal political action groups, scientists doing research, etc. What isn't as clear is whether any this can actually overcome the huge social and economic structural issues to actually make a dent.

When I was initially thinking about my personal impact to this, the first thing that came to mind is air-travel. I don't travel much, maybe once a year to see family. I have some friends who fly several times a year to "see the world", being well-traveled is a part of their personality. But I think I may be wrong on flight being a significant contribution. My guess is that we probably all contribute to this mainly through our SP500 index investments, which financially supports a number of companies that directly contribute to global warming. We're "voting with our dollars" as they say. Maybe we can all start picking individual stocks based on environmental values/promises, and less short-term gain. Somehow, I don't think it'll happen.

A flight can be a few tonnes of carbon. A European might emit ten tonnes a year. It’s pretty significant. For ourselves ( electric heating, well insulated house, no beef and low meat, no car )a flight can be half the year’s emissions.

The VOTE etf could be interesting to you.

Find a job from climate base, inclimate, etc

The CMIP7 scenarios were just released. AR7 is not yet completed but it's the input for it.

The "worst" RCP8.5 / SSP5-8.5-style futures (coal-dominated, ~4.4–4.9 °C) are no longer treated as plausible given policy already in place, renewable cost declines, and observed emissions.

The policy changes have changed the projections.

Warming will continue, yes. The consequences will have to be dealt with. In some regions this will be problematic. It's still political and economical factors that determines the outcome.

It's worth noting that there is a fair amount of eschatology or even apocalypticism going on. It's built into the human mind somehow.

> The "worst" RCP8.5 / SSP5-8.5-style futures (coal-dominated, ~4.4–4.9 °C) are no longer treated as plausible

That's a strange way of structuring such a comment. The temperature increase and concomitant catastrophes are still on the table, what was considered the plausible worst-case scenario with regard to how early that particular milestone might be reached has (apparently) been pushed back.

I've decided that I'm going to reverse climate change and everyone is welcome to come with me to figure it out.

If you're going to go networking in New York, maybe see if anyone is interested in running a study / pilot project on pushing carbonated water into ultramafic rock to kick start self powered (via hydrogen) carbon capture.

~ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49605466

This does seem to be the result of human activity. But I'm not really sure how the words 'we' and 'choose' work in a sentence like that. The collective of humanity doesn't really make choices the way I understand that word. And, while individual citizens make choices that contribute to this, and business people and politicians make choices that prioritize the short-term over the long term, it's not really correct to say they prefer and therefor choose the climate change. It seems like we don't have a good vocabulary for talking about the cumulative results of small choices.

I get what you’re saying, but that doesn’t seem helpful. We don’t need to discuss better words to describe the intricacies of the situation, we need to do something about it.

It also doesn’t help to keep saying “this does seem to be the result of human activity”. “Seems to be”? It is, the science has been clear on that for a long time. But even if it wasn’t our fault, it would still be our responsibility to fix it. Because, you know, we live on the planet.

If I’m inside a house and it catches on fire, I’m not going to kick back on the sofa and not do anything because I didn’t start the fire. If it started because a group of idiots decided to launch fireworks inside, I’m not going to argue semantics about who exactly thought it was a good idea and who didn’t—the fucking house is on fire—what we need is for everyone to work together right now to put it out.

The problem is that saying "we need to do something" is equally unhelpful because "we" isn't a thing that takes action in any ordinary sense of the word. You are just putting words together in a syntactically correct order that are devoid of actionable meaning. The way this sentence is normally interpreted is, somebody needs to do something, but it's not clear who that somebody is, or what power they need in order to act on a large enough scale to be effective.

If you can't say with any clarity what action needs to take place and by whom, then you aren't really contributing to a solution. Reacting to a fire in a house is much easier because it is clear how individual action can help. For example: you can call the fire department, I can get a fire extinguisher. Notice the word "we" is not in those sentences.

A very significant change everyone can make is to consume more plants and less animal products. Diet is one the most impactful changes one can make individually.

See here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-024-02084-1

Second, if you live in a cold country, improve your house heating efficiency and/or switch to heat pumps.

Third, consider a more efficient method of transportation, like bikes, walking, eletric vehicles, public transit, etc.. (bikes, walking and transit have the benefit of also being very good for our health)

Fourth, vote for politicians aware of the issues and enacting changes.

There's a lot everyone can make individually and collectively :)

---

Important to mention: if you're going to adopt a plant-based diet, there are a few things you need to supplement, for the most part vitamin B12, maybe Omega-3 and others, and you do need to make sure you're getting necessary nutrients from a variety of plants (for example, walnuts and chia seeds also contain Omega-3). There are many resources online with dietary guides.

>Second, if you live in a cold country, improve your house heating efficiency and/or switch to heat pumps.

Almost everything is inconsequential compared to living in a (detached) house. The detached house increases consumption of all kinds by orders of magnitude due to greatly increasing the distance everything moves to and around the house.

Ironically I live in a model of suburban bliss with tons of green space and it works because the houses are mostly row houses (terrace houses, tussenwoning, etc). It’s even easy to be car free here. Houten, NL

In the US, that would be considered urban, not suburban.

This is a US suburb:

https://www.planetizen.com/news/2024/02/127466-changing-shap...

Far less density of people.

Right (I grew up in US suburbia) but to people who visit us it feels suburban. Which I hope can help sell the idea that you can have the upsides of suburban life without living in a sea of asphalt.

From that lede photo, far less communal open space for walking, running, kicking a ball, etc.

Leading to a car centric less active and less communal lifestyle.

People who say which specific, effective actions should be taken by the common person have a tendency to get their accounts deleted. That is why they don't.

Ok, so what are YOU doing about it? If YOU are apart of WE, then please tell me how you’re fixing climate change? To the other posters points, this language does make it more difficult to process.

If I’m a carpenter ant eating away at this house, just like all other carpenter ants in the group, and I recognize that continued eating will collapse the house and kill all of us, what can I, a singular ant, do to stop everyone from munching away? I can say “we the ants must stop eating this house.” They just keep on eating. It’s not helpful.

Another post already has an excellent list.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49662025

I do all those and more. For example (relevant to your analogy), I speak with the people around me (never preachy, that’s no way to change someone’s mind) about why I do what I do, and adjust myself to be reasonable to the situation. It has instilled change in others, who in turn change others themselves. You the single ant are not alone. Motivate the people around you, there are other single ants in other parts doing the same. Expand your area until you meet, then keep going. If you look online in your area, you may be able to find other like minded people and groups with whom you can take collective action.

In past history, when someone was destroying the world, we did something.

I think most people would rather burn the world than have less parking to be honest.

i am doing something about it personally with the citizens climate lobby

Thanks for what you do! Here's a recent post on my newsletter about recognizing those who do the work: https://tito.co/posts/why-dont-i-complain-about-carbon-dioxi...

We? Ever heard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles ?

Yes, us - maybe scroll down to the part that points out Milankovitch cycles alone predict the earth should be cooling now (it isn't) and that

  non-orbital effects can be important (for example, the human impact on the environment principally increases greenhouse gases resulting in a warmer climate)

So, nice deflection attempt - but no prize.

Milanković cycles predict cooling on a thousand years scale, and what we measure is just a glitch.

The part you cite is climate conspiracy theory framing.

I wonder what caused the glitch. Maybe the temperature increase was caused by the increase in concentration of a gas that raises the temperature. Nah, must be magic pixies.

> climate conspiracy theory framing.

It's called "physics".

For anyone here looking to "do something" about global warming...One thing we're working on is how to avert the worst impacts of the 2026 El Niño, and use that as a way to break open a new conversation about the warming planet and what we can do about it.

One thing we need help with today is finding any other events at New York Climate Week that are about El Niño to feature on our site: https://elninoready.earth/

Is anyone here good at building lists of contacts? We're sending out a "Q&A about El Niño" to everyone organizing events at New York Climate Week, with the goal of having them spent 2 minutes talking about El Niño at their event.

We have a partial list...could use some help!

It's funny that your kinds of ideas were heresy a decade ago. Back then, we weren't supposed to think there was anything we could do about the effects of global warming in case we started to think mitigation was possible and stopped panicking. I suppose now that's politically permissiable?

Hmm. If being "politically permissible" has shifted, it's probably away from taking action at all.

What's shifted in the other direction is that it's getting too damn hot here and some people are starting to notice.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com