A new study finds that humans have contributed to more than two-thirds of the rapid melting of the Earth's glaciers, climate scientist Ben Marzeion announced Thursday at the University of Innsbruck in Austria.

Since 1851, scientists have been observing the melt of glaciers and did not see the effect of humans until approximately a hundred years later. The world warmed up, with three-fourths of the climate change attributed to mother nature and the remaining one-quarter had man's name on it.

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In 1991, the tables turned, with man making approximately 69 percent of the rapidly increasing melt, Marzeion said.

"Glaciers are really shrinking rapidly now," he said. "I think it's fair to say most of it is man-made."

The global warming has been the effect of burning fossil fuels such as gas, oil and coal, as well as soot pollution and changes in the used land near the glaciers of the world. The ice giants in the Alps and Alaska have more melting caused mainly by humans compared to the glaciers in the rest of the world, Marzeion said.

The study was a pioneer in calculating the amount of glacial melting that stemmed from the human population and "the jump from about a quarter to roughly 70 percent of total glacier mass loss is significant and concerning," said Regine Hick, a geophysicist from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, who was not part of the study.

Approximately 269 billion metric tons, or 295 billion tons, of ice has been melting each year over the last 20 years because of human causes and an estimated 121 million metric tons, or 130 billion tons, a year are melting due to natural causes, Marzeion calculated.

Marzeion and his team ran numerous simulation on a computer to figure out the total amount of melting present with all the causes considered, and repeated the program with only natural causes included. The difference between the two values are caused by the human population.

The margin of error in the computations is high so the 69 percent melting caused by humans may be down to 45 percent or could shoot up to 93 percent, but probably in the middle, according to U.S. News.

Tagsglobal warming, Melting, glaciers, Switzerland, Antartica