Photographer: Arterra / Editorial Universal Group Group / Getty images
Photographer: Arterra / Editorial Universal Group Group / Getty images
The melting of the ice sheets has accelerated so much over the past three decades that it is now in line with the worst global warming scenarios exposed by scientists.
Second, a total of 28 trillion metric tons of ice was lost between 1994 and 2017 a research paper published in The cryosphere Monday. The research team led by the University of Leeds in the UK was the first to conduct a global survey on global ice loss using satellite data.
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“The ice sheets now follow the worst-case warming scenarios set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” the author, Thomas Slater, said in a statement. “Although each region we studied lost ice, the losses of the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland have accelerated further.”
The melting of the layers and glaciers contributes to global warming and indirectly influences sea level rise, which in turn increases the risk of flooding in coastal communities. The Earth’s north and south poles are warming more than twice as fast as the rest of the planet. In 2020, a year of heat record, The extent of Arctic sea ice stood around the lowest for most of the year.
The new research, which uses information from the European Space Agency satellite network, found that the Earth lost 1.3 trillion tons of ice in 2017, from 0.8 trillion tons annually in the 1990s.
The lost ice equates to a 100-meter-thick layer of ice capable of covering the entire UK. Another way to think about it is how 28 giant ice cubes — one for every trillion metric tons of ice lost — each taller than Mount Everest and measuring 10 miles wide, high and deep, the scientists said.
“One of the key roles of Arctic sea ice is to reflect solar radiation back into space, which helps keep the Arctic cool,” said Isobel Lawrence, a researcher at the Polar Observation and Modeling Center in Leeds. “As sea ice shrinks, the oceans and atmosphere absorb more solar energy, which causes the Arctic to heat up faster than anywhere else on the planet.”
The survey, which also looked at 215,000 mountain glaciers around the planet, concluded that half of the losses were from ground ice, including the mountain glaciers and ice sheet of Greenland and Antarctica. These losses have raised the global sea level by an estimated 35 millimeters.