Study on Recent Change of Glacier *

The global glacier area is 16 million km and there is 60 thousand km in China. The steady and high accuracy information about the old climate and environmental change that stored in glaciers can be got by ice core studies. Chinese studies in ice core of alpine glacier have been equivalent to the world advanced level. The glacier responses to climate change sensitively, which mainly reflected in the fluctuation of mass balance, and there have 226 glaciers been monitored about glacier mass balance in the world. In recent decades it shows the increasing negative mass balance. The change information about the glaciers in vast area in recent decades can be got by comparing the satellite remote sensing data with the glacier inventory data. Preliminary results suggest that the glacier area in the northwestern China has retreated about 4.5% in recent thirty years, among which the edge of mountains retreats faster and the northwestern Tibet Plateau retreats the slowest. The tendency of glacier change can be forecasted by the application of the model of glacier system. That has no evident difference compared with that of the recent change of glacier.