Melting Glaciers May Release Staggering Amount of Carbon into the World's Oceans

As temperatures rise, glaciers and ice sheets around the world are continuing to melt. This added water, in turn, is contributing to rising sea levels. Now, though, scientists have found that there's another factor to worry about; melting glaciers could be a huge contributor to the release of carbon.

Organic carbon can be found in icy glaciers and ice sheets. These massive bodies of frozen water contain about 70 percent of Earth's freshwater. Glaciers, though, also store organic carbon that's derived from primary production on the glaciers and the deposition of materials such as soot or other fossil fuel combustion byproducts.

"This is the first attempt to figure out how much organic carbon is in glaciers and how much will be released when they melt," said Rober Spencer, one of the researchers, in a news release. "It could change the whole food web. We do not know how different ecological systems will react to a new influx of carbon."

In order to find out how much carbon can be found in glaciers, the scientists studied measurements from ice sheets in mountain glaciers globally, the Greenland ice sheet and the Antarctic ice sheet. They found that as glaciers melt, the amount of organic carbon transported by glacier meltwater will increase 50 percent over the next 35 years; that's about as much organic carbon in half of the Mississippi River being added each year to the ocean.

"This research makes it clear that glaciers represent a substantial reservoir of organic carbon," said Eran Hood, lead author of the new study. "As a result, the loss of glacier mass worldwide along with the corresponding release of carbon, will affect high-latitude marine ecosystems, particularly those surrounding the major ice sheets that now receive fairly limited land-to-ocean fluxes of organic carbon."

Currently, the scientists are continuing with additional studies to determine exactly what the impact of this extra carbon might be. This will help determine how officials might proceed in the future to mitigate negative impacts.

The findings are published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

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