Scientists are recording information of the world's glaciers to the glacier inventory, which contains its location, name, area, etc. The inventory has made possible scientific study with their joint system.

Eurasia is recognized as a region vulnerable the influence of global warming, in which annual mean air temperature significantly increased during the past few decades. To understand the influence of the global warming, it is primarily needed to access quantitatively changes in glacier and permafrost.

With the aim of understanding the relationship between interannual changes in weather and vegetation on a global scale, a map was created to show the correlation coefficients (positive parts only) of interannual changes between the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and air temperature; NDVI and precipitation; and NDVI and photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) in the summer seasons over a ten-year period (1986 to 1995).