Photographer: Arterra / Universal Images Group Editorial / Getty Images
Photographer: Arterra / Universal Images Group Editorial / Getty Images
The melting of the ice sheets has accelerated so much over the past three decades that it is now in line with the worst-case scenarios for global warming set by scientists.
A total of 28 billion tonnes of ice was lost in 1994. a research article published in The Cryosphere Monday. 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 worst climate warming scenarios outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” lead author Thomas Slater said in a statement. statement. “Although every region we studied lost ice, losses from the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets accelerated the most.”
Ice melting of sheets and glaciers contributes to global warming and indirectly affects sea level rise, which in turn increases the risk of flooding in coastal communities. The north and south poles of the earth become more than twice as hot as the rest of the planet. In 2020, a year of record heat, Arctic sea ice turned the lowest ever for most of the year.
The new research, which used information from the European Space Agency network of satellites, found that the earth lost 1.3 billion tons of ice in 2017, accelerating from 0.8 billion tons per year in the 1990s.
The lost ice is equivalent to a 100 meter thick ice that can cover the whole of the UK. Another way to think about it is as 28 giant ice cubes – one for every trillion tons of ice lost – each higher than Mount Everest and measuring 10 kilometers in width, height and depth, the scientists said.
“One of the most important roles of Arctic sea ice is to reflect solar radiation back into space, which helps keep the North Pole cool,” said Isobel Lawrence, a researcher at the Leeds Center for Polar Observation and Modeling. “As sea ice shrinks, more solar energy is absorbed by the oceans and atmosphere, causing the North Pole to heat up faster than elsewhere on the planet.”
The survey, which also analyzed 215,000 mountain glaciers around the planet, concluded that half of the losses on ice were on land, including mountain glaciers and the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheet. These losses increased the world sea level by an estimated 35 millimeters.