5 facts about melting ice caps

"We have a field program on a glacier in Switzerland, where we go back and see how much has melted, and the changes are absolutely massive," says lead author and glaciologist Harry Zekollari at ETH Zurich and Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

The vast majority of the world's 200,000 glaciers are also showing clear signs of warming, thinning between three and six feet per year, on average.

Predicting the future flow of glaciers

Simply tallying the annual losses for each glacier to predict how much ice will be left wouldn't result in accurate predictions.

"Because of the way glaciers flow, they respond to climate in a non-linear way," says glaciologist Lizz Ultee at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, who was not involved in the study.

To account for this, Zekollari and his colleagues used two computer models to simulate the complex physics of how glaciers move and change in mass.