The Earth’s ice sheets lost enough ice over the last 30 years to create an ice cube 12 miles high, according to new research.
The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are melting at a frightening rate, and are losing more than three times as much ice a year as they were 30 years ago, according to a new study by a team of international scientists.
The study, published in the journal, Earth Systems Science Data on April 20, 2023, used data from 50 satellite surveys of Antarctica and Greenland, spanning the years 1992 to 2020.
Greenland’s Ice Sheet
Greenland’s melt has gone into hyperdrive in the last few years, according to the study. Greenland’s average annual melt from 2017 to 2020 was 20 percent more a year than at the beginning of the decade and more than seven times higher than its annual shrinkage in the early 1990s, the Associated Press reports.
The new figures “are pretty disastrous really,” said study co-author Ruth Mottram, a climate scientist at the Danish Meteorological Institute. “We’re losing more and more ice from Greenland.”
The Study’s lead author Ines Otosaka, a glaciologist at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, said speeded-up ice sheet loss is clearly caused by human-caused climate change.
In all, the polar ice sheets lost more than 8.3 trillion tons of ice between 1992 and 2020, according to the study, CNN News reports.
The loss of ice is having a significant impact on the oceans, pushing up sea levels by 21 millimeters (just less than an inch), according to the report. Ice sheet melting now accounts for a quarter of all sea level rise – a fivefold increase since the 1990s.
“This is a huge amount of ice,” Otosaka told CNN. “This is very worrying, of course, because 40 percent of the global population lives in coastal areas,” she said.
Antarctica Ice Sheet
Scientists found that the rate at which the Antarctic ice sheet is melting has slowed, but remains much faster than in the 1990s.
The researchers identified the Antarctic Peninsula and West Antarctica – the location of the Thwaites Glacier (nicknamed the “Doomsday” glacier) for its potentially devastating impact on sea level rise – as the regions where most of the continent’s melt was happening.
East Antarctica remains close to a state of balance, with a small gain in ice over the preceding few years.
“In Antarctica, we have higher uncertainty in the future,” Otosaka said.”We have what we call some low-probability but high-impact mechanisms that could be triggered if we exceed a certain level of warming.”
A team of more than 65 scientists regularly calculates ice sheet loss in research funded by NASA and the European Space Agency with Thursday’s study adding three more years of data. They use 17 different satellite missions and examine ice sheet melt in three distinct techniques, Otosaka said, and all the satellites, radar, on-the-ground observations, and computer simulations basically say the same thing — ice sheet melting is accelerating.
University of Colorado ice researcher and former NASA chief scientist Waleed Abdalati, who wasn’t part of the study, in an email said, The study “is not so much surprising as it is disturbing. A few decades ago, it was assumed that these vast reservoirs of ice changed slowly, but through the use of satellite observations, field observations, and modeling techniques, we have come to learn that ice responds rapidly to our changing climate.”
