Committed ice loss in the European Alps will be 34 percent by 2050, rising to 46 percent with linear extrapolation of 2000 to 2020 mass-balance trends, according to a new study in Geophysical Research Letters.

Modeling the short-term evolution of glaciers–less than 50 years–is difficult because of issues related to model initialization and data assimilation. However, this time scale is critical, particularly for water resources, natural hazards and ecology.

Using a unique record of satellite remote sensing data, combined with a novel optimization and surface-forcing-calculation method within the framework of the deep-learning-based Instructed Glacier Model, the researchers are able to ameliorate initialization issues.

The team was thus able to model the committed evolution of all glaciers in the European Alps up to 2050 using present-day climate conditions, assuming no future climate change. They find that the resulting committed ice loss exceeds a third of the present-day ice volume by 2050, with multi-kilometer frontal retreats for even the largest glaciers.

The results show the importance of modeling ice dynamics to accurately retrieve the ice-thickness distribution and to predict future mass changes. Thanks to high-performance GPU processing, the study also demonstrates the method’s global potential.

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