If the glaciers on the mountains are melting, why can’t they regenerate and why can’t they be restored?
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They can regenerate, there is only no reason for them to since it would need to get colder instead of warmer which doesnt seem to be the case anytime soon.
Glaciers are made from frozen water. The planet is heating up so much, the ice is melting. The glaciers can’t regenerate because it’s too warm for water to freeze.
They grow when it is snowing.
As long as you get more snow in the winter than melting in the rest of the year a glacier will grow. But as it gets warmer it does not replenish the summer loss in winter therefore the glacier is getting smaller.
Yeah for a glacier to form any real thickness it needs a whole lot of snow and very cold seasons in which to grow beyond what they lose in the summer season. That balance of heat to cold ratio has tipped in the wrong direction of too warm for too long.
Glaciers are ice. Ice is cold water. When ice gets hot it turns back in to water. Sometimes that melting ice is on top of a mountain. When *that* ice turns into water it rolls down down down into the ocean with all the other water. It can eventually get back to the mountain top in the form of a snow flake to start building back that glacier. It takes a REALLY REALLY long time to build a glacier, and only a a short time to melt one. We need glaciers and we like the water exactly the way it is. So that’s why people talk about melting glaciers like it’s a little scary
Glaciers form because the average temperature in a year is low enough that all the snow that fall in the winter does not all melt in the summer. So you get a buildup of snow on top of the mountain year after year which eventually compact into ice and slowly flow down the mountain side to where it is warm enough for the ice to melt faster then it grows.
In general the temperature gets 1 degree Celcius lower for each 100 meter in altitude. And in the last few decades the average global temperatures have increased this much. This means that the ice melts at about 100 meter higher altitude then before and that the amount of new snow on the glaciers each year is reduced a lot due to melting, a lot of places older snow even melts on the top of glaciers.
We are not able to regenerate these glaciers without reducing the global average temperatures down to normal levels. And with the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, over twice the normal amount, this is impossible.
The ozone layer is acting like the freezer door and the more holes we cut into it (greenhouse gas situations) the more difficult it is to keep the cold inside. The less cold inside means that water can’t freeze as well.
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