Anyone who spends time near New Zealand’s glaciers will have pondered how snow avalanching affects our glaciers. It turns out, the answer is more than anywhere else in the world.

Marin Kneib from ETH in Zurich, Switzerland and colleagues have recently found avalanches contribute 15 % of the snow accumulation to New Zealand’s glaciers. This was the highest contribution for any glacier region of the world.

Most global climate change projections of glaciers ignore avalanche effects. Kneib wanted to know if this mattered or not. As it turns out, Kneib found that for any particular glacier, inclusion of avalanche processes could make a big change to climate change projections, but at the global level the effect was fairly minimal. It seems that the lack of explicit inclusion of avalanche processes is compensated for by adjustment of modelled snowfall. This means that at the large scale everything comes out pretty similar. The conclusion of Kneib’s work is that global projections of glaciers that ignore avalanches are probably OK.

The side effect of the research is that in New Zealand, we can claim top spot for avalanche contributions to glaciers. Well done New Zealand.

Marin Knieb’s research was published in Nature Communications.