The State of Glaciers in 2019

Two recent papers presented global assessments of glaciers outside of the two major ice sheets:

1. Farinotti et al. (March 2019, Nature Geoscience)
2. Zemp et al. (18 April 2019, Nature)

In summary: the about 215,000 glaciers (outside of the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets) represent about 0.4 m SLR equivalent and glacier mass balances are negative everywhere. Caveat: of these about 215,000 glaciers we only have direct mass balance observations from 450, ice thickness data from about 1,000, and geodetic mass balance data from 19,130.

I'm not so sure that these specific numbers are all that useful - here's the summary: there are a lot of glaciers on Earth and they are all losing mass due to global warming. The details are interesting, but not all that important.

Zemp et al. (2019, Figure 2)