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A glacier is a large mass of snow and ice that has accumulated over many years and is present year-round. In the United States, glaciers can be found in the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Nevada, the Cascades, and throughout Alaska. A glacier flows naturally like a river, only much more slowly. At higher elevations, glaciers accumulate snow, which eventually becomes compressed into ice. At lower elevations, the “river” of ice naturally loses mass because of melting and ice breaking off and floating away (iceberg calving) if the glacier ends in a lake or the ocean. When melting and calving are exactly balanced by new snow accumulation, a glacier is in equilibrium and its mass will neither increase nor decrease.
In many areas, glaciers provide communities and ecosystems with a reliable source of streamflow and drinking water, particularly in times of extended drought and late in the summer, when seasonal snowpack has melted away. Freshwater runoff from glaciers also influences ocean ecosystems. Glaciers are important as an indicator of climate change because physical changes in glaciers whether they are growing or shrinking, advancing or receding provide visible evidence of changes in temperature and precipitation. If glaciers lose more ice than they can accumulate through new snowfall, they ultimately add more water to the oceans, leading to a rise in sea level (see the Sea Level indicator). The same kinds of changes occur on a much larger scale within the giant ice sheets that cover Greenland and Antarctica, potentially leading to even bigger implications for sea level. Small glaciers tend to respond more quickly to climate change than the giant ice sheets. Altogether, the world’s small glaciers are adding roughly the same amount of water to the oceans per year as the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica combined. During the last two decades, they added more water overall to the oceans than the ice sheets did.
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