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 from a generation of rising temperatures.
Between 1994 and 2017, the Earth lost 28 trillion tons of ice, the study found. That’s an amount roughly equivalent to a 100-foot-thick layer of ice covering the state of Michigan or the entire UK – and the meltwater from so much ice loss has raised sea levels worldwide by just over an inch or so, the scientists said. .
“It’s so huge it’s hard to imagine,” said Thomas Slater, a research fellow at the University of Leeds Center for Polar Observation and Modeling and the lead author of a paper describing the new research. “Ice plays a critical 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 article was published Monday in the European Geophysical Union journal Cryosphere.
By adding together the loss of glaciers, ice shelves, polar ice caps and sea ice, Dr. Slater and his colleagues note that global meltdown has accelerated by 65% since the 1990s.