The glaciers of the Canadian West could shrink by 70 percent by 2100, according to new research that has implications for predicting glacier loss around the world.

The loss of mountain glaciers contributes to the rise in sea levels. As glaciers dwindle there could be also be pronounced effects on availability of water for aquatic creatures and for agriculture as well as water quality issues.

The report, published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience, combines scientific disciplines to develop an unusually powerful method of predicting glacier loss, including high-resolution regional models of current glaciers and the physics of ice flow. The researchers then applied their findings to the range of predictions of warming over time from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Under the calculations in the paper, glaciers in Western Canada will shrink to less than 10 percent of the area they covered in 2005, and glaciers in the coastal regions will be reduced to about 30 percent of their 2005 size.