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From Antarctica to the Arctic, the world’s ice is melting faster than ever, according to a new global satellite study that calculated how much ice was lost due to a generation of increasing temperatures.
Between 1994 and 2017, Earth lost 28 trillion metric tons of ice, according to the survey. That’s an amount roughly equivalent to a 100-meter-thick layer of ice covering the state of Michigan or the whole of the UK – and meltwater from so much ice loss has raised the level. of the sea of just over an inch in the world, the scientists said. .
“It’s so huge it’s hard to imagine,” said Thomas Slater, researcher at the Center for Polar Observation and Modeling at the University of Leeds in the UK and lead author of a paper describing the new research. “Ice plays a crucial role in regulating the world’s climate, and losses will increase the frequency of extreme weather events such as floods, fires, storm surges and heat waves.”
The article was published Monday in the European Geophysical Union’s journal, The Cryosphere.
Adding up the losses caused by glaciers, ice shelves, polar ice caps and sea ice, Slater and his colleagues determined that the global melt rate has accelerated by 65% over the years. 1990.
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