From Antarctica to the Arctic, the world’s ice is melting faster than ever, according to a new global satellite survey that calculated the amount of ice lost due to a rising generation of ice. temperatures.
Between 1994 and 2017, the Earth lost 28 trillion metric tons of ice, according to the survey. It is an amount roughly equivalent to a 100-meter-thick layer of ice covering the state of Michigan or the entire United Kingdom, and the melting water produced by so much ice loss has raised sea levels to more than about an inch worldwide, according to scientists. .
“It’s so big it’s hard to imagine,” said Thomas Slater, a researcher at the Center for Polar Observation and Modeling at the University of Leeds in the UK and lead author of an article describing the new research. “Ice plays a crucial role in regulating the global climate and losses will increase the frequency of extreme weather events such as floods, fires, storm surges and heat waves.”
The paper was published Monday in the journal The Cryosphere of the European Geophysical Union.
Adding the loss of glaciers, ice shelves, polar caps and sea ice, Dr. Slater and colleagues determined that the global merger rate has accelerated by 65% since the 1990s.