You said: "Instead of saying "worldwide glaciers are melting rapidly", you could just as accurately say worldwide glaciers are growing rapidly."

FROM:http://assets.panda.org/downloads/glacierspaper.pdf

THE ARCTIC
Over recent decades, Arctic glaciers have generally been shrinking, with the exception of Scandinavia and
Iceland, where increased precipitation has resulted in a positive balance36. Arctic melting appears to have
accelerated in the late 1990s; estimates of combined annual melting rose from 100 sq km per year from
1980-89 to 320 sq km in 1997 and 540 sq km in 199837. Greenland alone contains 12% of the world’s ice. While portions of the interior are gaining mass, there has been significant thinning and ice loss around the periphery.
This loss is not simply due to melting at the edges; entire portions of the Greenland ice sheet appear to be sliding towards the sea. Because this sliding accelerates when surface melting is most intense, it is believed that surface meltwater may be trickling down to the glacial bed and lubricating ice sheet movement38. This recent discovery provides a mechanism for rapid response of ice sheets to climate change, a process that was previously believed to require hundreds or thousands of years.

NORTH AMERICA

Glaciers in the Rocky Mountains and Western Coastal Ranges have experienced considerable
losses during this century, and melting is accelerating rapidly in southern Alaska. Since
Glacier National Park (Montana, USA) was established in 1910, more than two thirds of
its glaciers and about 75% of its glacier area has disappeared29; if the present rate of
warming continues, there will be no glaciers left in the Park by 203030. In Banff, Jasper,
and Yoho National Parks in the Canadian Rockies, glacier cover has decreased by at least 25%
during the 20th century31. South Cascade Glacier in coastal Washington (USA) lost 19 m of ice
thickness between 1976 and 1995, ten times more than during the previous 18 years32. Nearly
all glaciers surveyed in Alaska are melting, and thinning rates in the last 5-7 years are more
than twice those seen in previous decades13.

SOUTH AMERICA
The northern Andes contain the largest concentration of glaciers in the tropics, but these
glaciers are receding rapidly and losses have accelerated during the 1990s. In Peru,
Yanamarey Glacier lost a quarter of its area during the last fifty years25, and Uruashraju and
Broggi Glaciers lost 40-50% of their length from 1948-199026. In Ecuador, Antizana Glacier
shrank 7-8 times faster during the 1990s than in previous decades. Similarly, Glacier
Chacaltaya (Bolivia) lost nearly half of its area and two thirds of its volume during the mid-
1990s alone, and could disappear by 201027. In the sub-tropical wet Andes, the large ice masses
of the North Patagonia Icefield (Chile) and South Patagonia Icefield (Chile and Argentina)
had lost only 4-6% of their 1945 area by the mid 1990s28, but thinning has accelerated recently.
Parts of the southern icefield experienced thinning rates from 1995-2000 that were over
twice as fast as their average rates during the previous three decades14.

ANTARCTICA
Antarctica is blanketed by ice sheets that contain about 95% of the planet’s freshwater. Cold temperaturesprevent significant surface melting, but recent work shows that bottom melting underneath glaciers at the junction between land and sea is rapid and widespread throughout Antarctica, possibly due toincreased ocean temperatures39. Warmer seas have also contributed to the rapid thinning and breakup ofmany large, floating ice shelves. These shelves may buttress and slow the glaciers flowing into them;
although there was no change in glacier velocity after the loss of the Wordie Ice Shelf, several major ice
streams that nourished the Larsen A shelf are flowing as much as 2-3 times faster towards the sea since its breakup in 199540. At the same time, the interior has experienced an increase in accumulation because more water is being evaporated from warmer seas and falling as snow2. The extent to which these gains compensate for ice loss at the edges is unknown.

EUROPE
In the past four decades, the majority of glaciers in the Alps
have experienced considerable mass losses; this is illustrated
by the Hintereisferner (Austria), Gries (Switzerland), and Sarennes
(France), each of which lost the equivalent of 14 m ice thickness
since the 1960s. Glacier melting has accelerated since 1980,
and 10-20% of glacier ice in the Alps was lost in less than
two decades18. The discovery of a 5300-year old ice man in a
melting glacier in Italy demonstrates that many glaciers are
now smaller than they have been for thousands of years. The
World Meteorological Organization reports that summer 2003
temperatures, which triggered floods, land slides, and the rapid
formation of glacial lakes, were the hottest ever recorded in
northern and central Europe; if current trends continue, the
European Alps will lose major parts of their glacier coverage
within the next few decades18.

ASIA
The vast majority of all Himalayan glaciers
have been retreating and thinning over the past
30 years, with accelerated losses in the last
decade. For example, glaciers in the Bhutan
Himalayas are now retreating at an average rate
of 30-40 m per year22. In Central Asia, glaciers
are wasting at exceptionally high rates. In the
northern Tien Shan (Kazakhstan), glaciers have
been collectively losing 2 sq km of ice (0.7% of
their total mass) per year since 1955, and
Tuyuksu glacier has receded nearly a kilometer
since 192310. Glaciers in the Ak-shirak Range
(Kyrgyzstan) have lost 23% of their area since
197723, similar to area losses in the northern
Tien Shan (29% from 1955-1990) and the
Pamirs (16% from 1957-1980). In the Chinese
Tien Shan, Urumqihe Glacier lost the equivalent
of 4 m ice thickness from 1979-199524, and the
Chinese Meteorological Administration predicts
that China’s northwestern mountains will
lose over a quarter of their current glacier coverage
by 2050. These glaciers supply 15-20%
of the water to over 20 million people in the
Xinjiang and Qinghai Provinces alone45.

AFRICA
Tropical glaciers in Africa have decreased in area by 60-70% on
average since the early 1900s. The ice fields atop Mt. Kilimanjaro
have lost 80% of their area during this century and despite
persisting for over 10,000 years, they are likely to disappear
by 202019. On Mt. Kenya, 7 of the 18 glaciers present in 1900
had disappeared by 199320, and four glaciers (Lewis, Tyndall,
Gregory and Cesar) had lost between 60% and 92% of their
area. The remaining glaciers in the Ruwenzori Mountains of
Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo are also melting
rapidly, with area losses during the 20th century ranging
from 53% (Speke) to 90% (Moore)21.

SOUTH PACIFIC
The tropical Carstensz Glaciers in Papua Province (formerly Irian Jaya),
Indonesia are melting rapidly; 80% of their collective area was lost between
1942 and 200033. The West Meren Glacier receded 2600 m since it was
first surveyed in 1936, before melting away sometime between 1997
and 1999. In Papua New Guinea, three summit ice domes that were
known to exist in the Central Cordillera Range disappeared in the 1960s34.
In temperate New Zealand, 127 glaciers surveyed in the Southern Alps
have shortened by 38% and lost 25% of their area since the mid 1850s35;
however, many of these glaciers have advanced in recent decades, presumably
due to increased precipitation.