The world’s ice is melting so fast that sea level forecasts cannot keep up.
In the 1990s, the earth’s ice melted about 760 billion tons per year. It rose 60 percent to an average of 1.2 billion tons a year in the 2010s, a study published Monday in the journal. The Cryosphere estimates. And like another study earlier this month in Scientific progress makes it clear that the problem feeds into itself.
Climate change is mainly responsible for the great ice melt flood, the Cryosphere study reports. The study estimates that about three percent of all the energy trapped in the earth’s systems due to climate change went to the ice melt. “It’s like more than 10,000 ‘Back to the Future’ lightning per second of melting ice since around the clock,” said William Colgan, an expert on the ice sheet at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland. The Washington Post. “It’s just a little bit of energy.”
Climate change not only melts ice sheets on land, but also heats seawater to melt glaciers from below. Forecasts for rising sea levels could not offset the undercutting of the ice by “at least a factor of 2” Scientific progress study found.
“Together, the two studies present a worrying picture,” the Post write. The first study found “the ice sheets are now following the worst-case scenarios for climate warming set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” study author Thomas Slater said in a statement. But the second reveals that the panel’s projections on sea level, which have already been considered conservative, further underestimated the role of the interruption of the ice in the accelerated ice melt. Read more at The Washington Post.
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