Scientists warn melting glaciers could form more than 50,000 new lakes in areas covered by ice

Across the globe, there are approximately 200,000 to 275,000 glaciers that hold 69% of the world's fresh water. They are found in every continent except Australia and are in heavy concentrations in the Arctic, Alaska, and Antarctica along with high mountain ranges like the Himalayas and Andes. But what happens when climate change causes all these glaciers to melt?In a study published in Nature Communications, researchers from Sweden, US, Switzerland and Norway mapped what lies beneath all the glaciers on the planet and reached a shocking conclusion: when part of this ice disappears, Earth could gain 56,659 new lakes in areas currently completely frozen.The hidden terrainThe idea was to understand what the Earth’s surface would look like if the glaciers disappeared. Led by researchers from Uppsala University in Sweden, Carnegie Mellon University in US, University of Lausanne in Switzerland and University of Oslo in Norway, the team analysed glaciers outside the large ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica.They reconstructed the topography beneath the glaciers using a three-dimensional ice flow model called Instructed Glacier Model, accelerated by GPU and deep learning. The idea was ...