Evidence of shrinking Alpine glaciers presented at AGU meeting

BBC : Another potential casualty of global warming may be Alpine glaciers. According to research presented this week at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting in San Francisco, glaciers in the French Alps have lost a quarter of their area over the past 40 years. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, ice fields in the Mont Blanc range and surrounding mountains covered some 375 km ². By the late 2000s, that area had shrunk to 275 km ². Marie Gardent of the University of Savoie in France and colleagues used map archives, satellite imagery, and aerial photographs to conduct their study.