Photographer: Arterra / Universal Images Group Editorial / Getty Images
Photographer: Arterra / Universal Images Group Editorial / Getty Images
Melting on the ice sheets has accelerated so much over the past three decades that it is now consistent with the worst climate warming scenarios outlined by scientists.
In total, 28 trillion tons of ice were lost between 1994 and 2017 a research paper published in The cryosphere on Monday. The research team led by the University of Leeds in the UK was the first to conduct a global study of global ice loss using satellite data.
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“The ice sheets are now following the worst climate warming scenarios set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” lead author Thomas Slater said in a statement. statement. “While every region we studied lost ice, the ice sheet losses in Antarctica and Greenland have accelerated the most.”
Melting ice from plates and glaciers is contributing to global warming and indirectly affecting sea level rise, which in turn increases the risk of flooding in coastal communities. Earth’s north and south poles is warming more than twice as fast as the rest of the planet. In 2020, a year of absorb heat, Arctic sea ice has been hovering around its lowest ever for most of the year.
The new research, which used information from the European Space Agency network of satellites, found that the Earth lost 1.3 trillion tons of ice in 2017, accelerating from 0.8 trillion tons per year in the 1990s.
The lost ice corresponds to a 100 meter thick layer of ice that can cover the entire UK. Another way of seeing it is as 28 giant ice cubes – one for every trillion metric tons of ice lost – each larger than Mount Everest and measuring 10 kilometers in width, height and depth, the scientists said.
“One of the primary roles of Arctic sea ice is to reflect solar radiation back into space, keeping the Arctic cool,” said Isobel Lawrence, a researcher at Leeds’ Center for Polar Observation and Modeling. “As the sea ice shrinks, more solar energy is being absorbed by the oceans and atmosphere, warming the Arctic faster than anywhere else in the world.”
The study, which also analyzed 215,000 mountain glaciers around the planet, concluded that half of the losses were due to ice on land, including from mountain glaciers and the Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets. These losses have caused sea levels to rise by an estimated 35 millimeters worldwide.