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 billion metric tons of ice, the survey showed. This is a quantity roughly equivalent to a 100-meter-thick sheet of ice covering the state of Michigan or the entire United Kingdom – and the water melted due to so much ice loss has raised sea levels by just over an inch around the world, they said. said the scientists.
“It’s such a large amount that 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 the lead author of a paper 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 Union of Geophysics.
Adding the loss from glaciers, ice shelves, polar caps and sea ice, Dr. Slater and colleagues determined that the global melting rate has accelerated by 65% since the 1990s.