Global ice melting is worst climate scenario, study finds

Photographer: Arterra / Universal Images Group Editorial / Getty images

The melting of the ice caps has accelerated so much over the past three decades that it now conforms to the worst global warming scenarios described by scientists.

A total of 28 trillion metric tonnes of ice was lost between 1994 and 2017, according to 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 study of global ice loss using satellite data.

“The ice caps are now following the worst-case scenarios of global warming defined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” lead author Thomas Slater said in a declaration. “While all of the regions we studied lost ice, it was the loss of the Antarctic and Greenland ice caps that accelerated the most.”

Melting ice sheets and glaciers contribute to global warming and indirectly influence sea level rise, which in turn increases the risk of flooding in coastal communities. Earth’s north and south poles are warming more than twice as fast as the rest of the planet. In 2020, a year of heat record, The extent of sea ice in the Arctic has hovered around the lowest on record for most of the year.

The new research, which used information from the European Space Agency satellite network, found that the Earth lost 1.3 trillion tonnes of ice in 2017, from 0.8 trillion metric tonnes per year in the 1990s.

Lost ice is equivalent to a layer of ice 100 meters thick capable of covering the whole of the UK. Everest and measuring 10 kilometers in width, height and depth, the the scientists said.

“One of the key roles of arctic sea ice is to reflect solar radiation back into space, which helps keep the arctic cool,” said Isobel Lawrence, researcher at the Center for Polar Observation and Modeling from Leeds. “As sea ice shrinks, more solar energy is absorbed by the oceans and the atmosphere, causing the Arctic to warm faster than anywhere else on the planet.”

The survey, which also analyzed 215,000 mountain glaciers around the planet, concluded that half of the losses came from ice on land, including mountain glaciers and the Greenland ice sheet and the Antarctic. These losses have raised the world’s sea level by about 35 millimeters.