All The Ice on Earth May Be Melting
In several recent surveys, researchers have concluded that the Earth's ice levels are decreasing at an alarming rate and must be taken into account.
Earth’s ice is melting faster today than it was in the 1990s, new research suggests, as climate change nudges global temperatures ever higher. Altogether, an estimated 28 trillion metric tons of ice have melted away from the world’s sea ice, ice sheets, and glaciers since the mid-1990s. Annually, the melt rate is now about 57% faster than it was three decades ago, scientists report in a study published Monday in the journal The Cryosphere.
“It was a surprise to see such a large increase in just 30 years,” said co-author Thomas Slater, a glaciologist at Leeds University in Britain. While the situation is clear to those depending on mountain glaciers for drinking water, or relying on winter sea ice to protect coastal homes from storms, the Earth’s ice melt has begun to move attention far from frozen regions, Slater noted.
Aside from being captivated by the beauty of polar regions, “people do recognize that, although the ice is far away, the effects of the melting will be felt by them,” he said. The melting of land ice, on Antarctica, Greenland, and mountain glaciers has added enough water to the ocean during the three-decade time period to raise the average global sea level by 3.5 centimeters. Moreover, ice loss from mountain glaciers accounted for 22% of the annual ice loss on Earth, which is astonishing considering it accounts for only about 1% of all land ice on the land, Slater stated.
Across the Arctic, sea ice is also decreasing to new lows. Last year saw the second-lowest sea ice extent in more than 40 years of satellite monitoring. As sea ice vanishes, it exposes the dark water which absorbs solar radiation, instead of reflecting it back out of the atmosphere. This phenomenon, known as Arctic amplification, boosts regional temperatures even further and has been damaging the Earth’s atmosphere. The global atmospheric temperature has risen by about 1.1 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times. But in the Arctic, the warming rate has been more than twice the global average in the last 30 years.
Calculating even an estimated ice loss total from the Earth’s glaciers, ice sheets, and polar seas is “a really interesting approach and one that’s actually quite needed,” said geologist Gabriel Wolken with the Alaska Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys. In Alaska, people are “keenly aware” of glacial ice loss, Wolken said. “You can see the changes with the human eye.” Research scientist Julienne Stroeve of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado noted the study had not included snow cover over land, “which also has a strong albedo feedback”, referring to a measure of how reflective a surface is.
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