The earth is losing ice faster today than it was in the mid-1990s, the study suggests

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) – Earth’s ice is melting faster today than it was in the mid-1990s, new research suggests, as climate change pushes global temperatures higher.

In total, an estimated 28 trillion metric tons of ice have melted from the world’s sea ice, ice sheets and glaciers since the mid-1990s. Annually, the melting rate is now about 57% faster than in Three decades ago, scientists report in a study published Monday in The Cryosphere.

“It was a surprise to see such a huge increase in just 30 years,” said co-author Thomas Slater, a glaciologist at the University of Leeds in the UK.

Although the situation is clear for those who depend on mountain glaciers to drink water or rely on winter sea ice to protect coastal houses from storms, the world’s melting ice has begun to draw attention away from frozen regions, Slater noted. .

In addition to being captivated by the beauty of the polar regions, “people recognize that although the ice is far away, the effects of the melting will be felt by them,” he said.

Melting ice on land – in Antarctica, Greenland and mountain glaciers – added enough water to the ocean over three decades to raise the global average sea level by 3.5 centimeters. Ice loss from mountain glaciers accounted for 22 percent of total annual ice loss, which is noteworthy, accounting for only about 1 percent of all ice on earth, Slater said.

Throughout the Arctic, sea ice shrinks to new summer lows. Last year saw the second-smallest stretch of sea ice in 40 years of satellite monitoring. As the sea ice disappears, it exposes dark water that absorbs solar radiation, rather than reflecting it from the atmosphere. This phenomenon, known as Arctic amplification, further increases regional temperatures.

Global atmospheric temperature has risen by about 1.1 degrees Celsius since the pre-industrial period. But in the Arctic, the warming rate has more than doubled the global average over the past 30 years.

Using satellite data 1994–2017, site measurements and some computer simulations, the British team of scientists estimated that the world lost an average of 0.8 trillion metric tons of ice per year in the 1990s, but about 1, 2 trillion metric tons annually in recent years.

Calculating even an estimated loss of ice from the world’s glaciers, ice sheets and polar seas is “a really interesting approach and one that is actually quite necessary,” said geologist Gabriel Wolken of the Division of Geological Studies and Alaska Geophysics. Wolken was co-author of the Arctic Report Card 2020 released in December, but was not involved in the new study.

In Alaska, people are “extremely aware” of the loss of glacial ice, Wolken said. “You can see the changes with the human eye.”

Researcher Julienne Stroeve of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, noted that the study did not include the snow layer on land, “which also has strong albedo feedback,” referring to a measure of the reflectivity of a surface.

The research also did not take into account river or lake ice or permafrost, except that it said that “these elements of the cryosphere have also undergone considerable changes in recent decades.”