I'm doing an essay about the biodiversity of the vegetation in a region where the glacier retreated in the last 150 years, so I had the opportunity to study the connections between these phenomenons and the climate changing and I found a lot of interesting datas, which made me think about a few things. Here in Switzerland the glaciers lost a large amount of their volume of ice and the surface is much smaller than before. The problem is that the glaciers reflect more or less the 80% of the light, so if they disappear the earth will absorb more heat and the temperature will increase, because the earth doesn't reflect much light (more ore less the 20%). An other meaningful problem is that the glaciers need much time to come back on a balance stage, so even if the temperature decrease in a little time, it will be still necessary some time to reach a stasis point. There is the risks that the glaciers will disappear in the next decades and a lot of species will suffer because of this temperature increase and changes of ecosystems.

You can find a lot of interesting infos on w ww.meteoswiss.admin.ch and I used a lot as a source for my essay. You can find the mass balance of the glaciers or other datas about the climate in Switzerland from 1863 down to the present.

It's crazy to read the data of the Swiss glacier's volume, in the last summer they lost 2.5 % of their volume. The last winter was very snowy but this very very hot and shoal summer has been a tragedy. It's very painful to see the glacier merge so fast and without possibility of stopping this process.