A new study published on January 25 in the journal The Cryosphere, revealed that the rate at which ice is disappearing across the planet is speeding up. The Earth lost 28 trillion tons of ice between 1994 and 2017—equivalent to a sheet of ice 100 meters thick covering the whole of the UK.
The research team, led by the University of Leeds, found that the rate of ice loss from the Earth has increased markedly within the past three decades, from 0.8 trillion tons per year in the 1990s to 1.3 trillion tons per year by 2017. This team is the first to carry out a survey of global ice loss using satellite data.
Ice melt across the globe raises sea levels, increases the risk of flooding to coastal communities, and threatens to wipe out natural habitats which wildlife depend on.
The research, funded by UK Natural Environment Research Council, shows that overall, there has been a 65 percent increase in the rate of ice loss over the 23-year survey. This has been mainly driven by steep rises in losses from the polar ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland.
In a report published on the university's website, Lead Author Thomas Slater, a research fellow at Leeds' Center for Polar Observation and Modeling, said: "Although every region we studied lost ice, losses from the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets have accelerated the most. The ice sheets are now following the worst-case climate warming scenarios set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change."
"Sea-level rise on this scale will have very serious impacts on coastal communities this century."
The study was the first of its kind to examine all the ice that is disappearing on Earth, using satellite observations.
"Over the past three decades, there's been a huge international effort to understand what's happening to individual components in Earth's ice system, revolutionized by satellites which allow us to routinely monitor the vast and inhospitable regions where ice can be found. Our study is the first to look at all the ice that is being lost from the entire planet," said Slater.
The survey covers 215,000 mountain glaciers spread around the planet, the polar ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, the ice shelves floating around Antarctica, and sea ice drifting in the Arctic and Southern Oceans. Rising atmospheric temperatures have been the main driver of the melting of the planet's ice sheet.