Photographer: Arterra / Universal Images Group Editorial / Getty images
Photographer: Arterra / Universal Images Group Editorial / Getty images
Melting on ice sheets has accelerated so much in the last three decades that it is now in line with the worst-case warming scenarios presented by scientists.
A total of 28 trillion metric tons of ice was lost between 1994 and 2017, according to a research paper published in Cryosphere months. The research team led by the University of Leeds in the UK was the first to conduct a global survey of global ice loss using satellite data.
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“The ice sheets are now following the most unfavorable global warming scenarios set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” said lead author Thomas Slater in a statement. “Although every region we studied lost ice, the losses in the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland accelerated the most.”
Melting ice from plates and glaciers contributes to global warming and indirectly influences sea level rise, which in turn increases the risk of flooding in coastal communities. The North and South Poles of the Earth are warming more than twice as fast as the rest of the planet. In 2020, a year of heat record, The expansion of Arctic sea ice has fluctuated around the lowest ever for most of the year.
The new research, which used information from the European Space Agency satellite network, 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 is equivalent to a sheet of ice 100 meters thick, capable of covering the whole of the United Kingdom. Another way of thinking is 28 giant ice cubes – one for every trillion tons of ice lost – each taller than Mount Everest and measuring 10 kilometers in width, height and depth, said the scientists.
“One of the key roles of Arctic sea ice is to reflect solar radiation back into space, which helps maintain Arctic coolness,” said Isobel Lawrence, a researcher at the Polar Observation and Modeling Center in Leeds. “As sea ice shrinks, more solar energy is absorbed by the oceans and atmosphere, causing the Arctic to heat up faster than anywhere else on the planet.”
The survey, which also looked at 215,000 mountain glaciers around the world, found that half of the losses were caused by land ice, including mountain glaciers and the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheet. These losses raised the global sea level by about 35 millimeters.