From Antarctica to the Arctic, the world’s ice is melting faster than ever, according to a new global satellite survey that calculated the amount of ice lost from a generation of rising temperatures. Between 1994 and 2017, the Earth lost 28 trillion metric tons of ice, the survey showed. That is an amount roughly equivalent to a sheet of ice 100 meters thick covering the state of Michigan or the entire U.K.—and the meltwater from so much ice loss has raised the sea level just over an inch or so world-wide, the scientists said.
“It’s such a huge amount it’s hard to imagine it,” said Thomas Slater, a research fellow at the U.K.’s University of Leeds Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling and the lead author of a paper describing the new research. “Ice plays a crucial role in regulating the global climate, and losses will increase the frequency of extreme weather events such as flooding, fires, storm surges, and heatwaves.”
The paper was published Monday in the European Geophysical Union’s journal the Cryosphere. Adding up the loss from glaciers, ice shelves, polar ice caps and sea ice, Dr. Slater and his colleagues determined that the rate of global melting has accelerated 65% since the 1990s.
The ice loss has grown from 0.8 trillion tons a year to 1.3 trillion tons a year, driven by rising atmospheric and ocean temperatures resulting from greenhouse gas emissions, the scientists said. Slightly more than half the ice loss occurred in the Northern Hemisphere. Dr. Slater and a team of eight other scientists from the University of Edinburgh, University College London and a Edinburgh-based climate data company called Earth Wave Ltd. based their findings on 50 studies of ice loss, field measurements and data from 17 satellite missions.
“It’s a reminder that dangerous climate change is already here, in this case in the form of melting ice, rising sea level and the inundation of our coastlines,” said Michael Mann, a Pennsylvania State University climatologist and author of “The New Climate War.” He wasn’t involved in the research.
The new research comes as the U.S. moved last week to rejoin the Paris Agreement, an international climate accord designed to limit greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050 and keep the rise in global temperature to no more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius), compared with preindustrial levels.
Former President Trump officially withdrew from the accord last year after vowing to do so for several years.
The average global temperature has risen about 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the 1880s, when systematic record-keeping began, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.