WMO warns of rapid changes at the Poles, “sleeping giant” of climate change

The progressive melting of the cryosphere (Poles and other areas of the Earth where water is in a solid state) can aggravate the climate change by the greenhouse gases that it stores, warned this Monday the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in a resolution where he calls for increased surveillance of these areas of the planet.

During the current World Meteorological Congress, the organization’s annual meeting, it recalled that Poles, high mountain glacier areas and other parts of the cryosphere store twice as many greenhouse gases as those present in the atmosphere, which makes these zones in a “sleeping giant” for the feared global warming.

For this reason, during the assembly a resolution was approved in which the WMO agrees to make the cryosphere one of its main priorities, which requires more coordinated observations of these regions, better data exchange between the institutions that study them, and more funding for this research.

The Geneva-based organization recalls that more than a billion people live in areas that depend on water from the cryosphere to feed their rivers, many of them part of the world’s great river basins.

The melting of glaciers, Greenland and Antarctica has contributed to half of the sea level rise, which is accelerating, adds the WMO, which also warns of an increase in floods, landslides and ice and other catastrophes related to the thaw.

In its recent 2022 climate report, WMO noted that baseline glaciers have reduced in thickness by an average of 1.3 meters since 2021, a much larger reduction than the average for the past decade, while the loss in the last half century reaches almost 30 meters.

The situation is especially serious in areas like the Alps, where between 2021 and 2022 a country like Switzerland lost a 6% of the volume of its glaciers, while so far this century the reduction has been around 33%

On the other hand, the extent of sea ice in Antarctica stood at 1.92 square kilometers in 2022, the lowest measurement on record and almost one million square meters below the average of the last 30 years.

Source: EFE