FRIDAY FOTO (April 30, 2021)

Ice Palace.

(Photo by Benjamin Wilson) Click on photo to enlarge the image.

A soldier from the U.S. Army’s 52nd Aviation Regiment watches the mountains and glaciers of Alaska’s Denali National Park and Reserve pass below his CH-47 Chinook helicopter on April 22, 2021.

Members of B Company, 1st Battalion of the 52nd AR, known as “The Sugar Bears,” have permission to conduct training in the park in exchange for helping the National Park Service set-up base camp for the 2021 Denali climbing season.

The Army provides assistance annually to the Park Service by flying in supplies to the base camp, which is located at 7,200 feet.

While the landscape in this photo is breath-taking, new satellite imagery reveals that the world’s glaciers are melting faster than ever due to climate change — and half the world’s glacial loss is occurring in the United States and Canada.

According to a study in the science journal Nature, glaciers are melting faster, losing 31 percent more snow and ice per year than they did 15 years earlier, the Associated Press reported via NBC. The gloomy forecast is based on three-dimensional satellite measurements of all the world’s mountain glaciers. Scientists blame human-caused climate change, the AP noted.

A French-led team assessed the behavior of nearly all documented ice streams on the planet. The researchers found them to have lost almost 270 billion tons of ice a year over the opening two decades of the 21st Century, the BBC reported.

The research team, led by Romain Hugonnet from the University of Toulouse, France, used as its primary data source the imagery acquired by NASA’s Terra satellite, which was launched in 1999. Immense computing power was brought to bear on the process of interpreting these pictures and pulling out the changes in the glaciers’ elevation, volume and mass up to 2019, the BBC noted.