Central Asia's Tien Shan mountain range is home to glaciers that bring water to tens of millions of people, but their future is threatened thanks to warming summer temperatures, according to the results of a new study.

Published earlier this week in the scientific journal Nature Geoscience, the study says the glaciers , and stand to lose as much as half their current ice if current climate trends continue.

The Tien Shen glaciers are part of a system known as the "Water Towers of Asia," which also includes the glaciers atop theHimalayas–Hindu Kush, Kunlun Shan and Pamir mountain ranges. Collectively, the glacier-fed rivers within these mountains –which alone are home to some 170 million people –influence the lives of .

An astronaut photograph of the central Tien Shan glaciers taken from the International Space Station on March 16, 2011.

(NASA Visible Earth)

Their importance to the region can't be overstated, the United Nations Environment Program : "The rivers provide household water, food, fisheries, power, jobs and are at the heart of cultural traditions. The rivers shape the landscape and ecosystems and are important in terms of biodiversity."

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Because they store water that falls as snow and becomes ice for decades, glaciers like the Tien Shan can take precipitation that falls in winter and release it in the summer months, providing critical water to places that have ", since local water supply is then closely linked to meltwater availability," Science Daily notes.

The Tien Shan glaciers also are melting much more quickly than most of the rest of the world's glacial ice. They've lost about 27 percent of their mass in the past 50 years, compared to about 7 percent for glaciers worldwide during the same time period.

Why are they melting so quickly? The Wall Street Journal notes that the Tien Shan glaciers " because its winters are especially cold and dry, which means there’s hardly any snow [during that season]."

In summer —the season when the glaciers receive most of their snow —rising temperatures mean less snow is falling on themwhile they're also melting away more rapidly.

"You’re double-hitting the glacier — that is why they’re so sensitive to changes in temperature," Daniel Farinotti, a glaciologist at the GFZ German Research Center for Geosciences and the study's lead author, said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

It hasn't been easy to obtain accurate readings of the glaciers' melting, Farinotti notes. "Despite [their] importance, only little was known about how glaciers in this region changed over the last century," he .

Most of the monitoring programs set up to keep track of their ice loss were shut down following the breakup of the Soviet Union, and new ones have begun only in recent years, so there's a significant gap in time for direct measurements in many places.

To put together as complete a picture as possible of the glaciers' ice loss, Farinotti and his team used satellite data, direct field observations and models of glacial melting. They even used data from NASA's ICESat satellite, which , to estimate changes in ice thickness.

If global warming is allowed to continue unabated, climate models suggest that rising summer temperatures throughout the region will eventually impact the water supply and lead to potential problems with food security for tens of millions of people.

"In the long term, the only way people are going to save glaciers is to ," Farinotti told Live Science.

"Another way to deal with the decline in water supplies in this region is to improve irrigation practices there," he added. "Irrigation there dates back to the Soviet era 40 years ago, and increasing the efficiency of irrigation there could help grow crops even with less water."

MORE FROM WEATHER.COM: Repeat Photography of Glaciers, Decades Ago and Today

Pedersen Glacier is photographed from Aialik Bay in Alaska in 1909. (USGS/ U.S. Grant)