AI Can Help Track the World’s Shrinking Glaciers

Tracking how fast glaciers are shrinking is crucial for measuring the pace of climate change and projecting future sea level rises. This is normally a painstaking manual job, but a new approach that enables AI to analyze satellite images of glaciers anywhere in the world could help automate the monitoring process. Glaciers that flow directly into the ocean play a crucial role in the earth’s climate, but global warming is making them retreat ever faster. This can have severe knock-on effects as ice that breaks away from “calving fronts”—the ends of glaciers where icebergs shear off into the water—dumps massive amounts of freshwater into the sea, which can alter ocean currents and cause sea levels to rise. Bright white glaciers also reflect a lot of sunlight. When they shrink, they expose dark seawater that absorbs heat from the sun. All of this means that tracking glacier loss is critical for…