Third party funded individual grant
Acronym: FRAGILE
Start date : 01.02.2021
End date : 31.01.2026
The Glacier National Park in Montana, in the United States, was established in 1910 with approximately 150 glaciers. That number has shrunk to less than 30, and even those remaining cover only about a third of the area they did a little over a century ago. For more than 30 years in a row we have been witnessing the mass loss of mountain glaciers worldwide, which is dramatic evidence of the acceleration of global warming. This melting is putting millions of people at risk from floods, drought and lack of drinking water. The EU-funded FRAGILE project is developing significantly improved models of global glacier evolution, resolving glaciers within their complex 3D valley topography, drawing on the immense information flow from Earth observations and building on regional rather than global climate forecasts. Moreover, FRAGILE will boost the confidence in the present-day glacier ice volume by calibrating estimates for each glacier on Earth.