Scientists have tracked the fate of the Peyto Glacier in the Rocky Mountains for decades as a global reference point. It’s disappearing faster than expected, which is a warning sign for communities downstream that depend on its water.

Scientists are racing to collect ice cores — along with long-frozen records they hold of climate cycles — as global warming melts glaciers and ice sheets. Some say they are running out of time. And, in some cases, it's already too late.

On Sunday torrents of water, rock and dust hurtled down a mountain valley in the Uttarakhand state of Northern India. A Himalayan glacier broke below 7,816-metre Nanda Devi, India’s second-highest peak, sweeping away a small hydroelectric project and damaging a bigger one further downstream. One hundred to 150 people were feared dead.

The statistics in her recently published paper say it all: hundreds of glaciers in Canada's High Arctic are shrinking and many are likely to disappear completely.

Over the past 50 years, some of Glacier National Park's namesake glaciers have shrunk by as much as 85 percent.

Kebnekaise mountain in Sweden will no longer be the tallest in the country as the glacier on its highest peak melts rapidly in an unprecedented heat wave.