ice Sheet melt: 20 April (UPI) — According to a three-decade-long research released Thursday, the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica are melting at an increasing rate, significantly raising the sea level.
The polar caps lost 7,563 billion tonnes of ice between 1992 and 2020, and the rate of melting is accelerating, according to scientists who monitored ice losses from Greenland and the Antarctic during a 29-year period using 50 satellites—27 for Greenland and 23 for Antarctica.
The rate of melting more than tripled from 105 billion tonnes per year during the first four years of the study to 372 billion tonnes per year between 2016 and 2020, contributing to 0.8 inches of global mean sea level over the 29-year period, or about 25% of sea level rise, according to the study published in the journal Earth System Science Data.
In comparison to the early 1990s, the rate of ice loss is currently five times higher in Greenland and 25% higher in Antarctica.
The study’s principal author, Dr. Ines Otosaka of the British Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling, told the BBC that “all this has profound implications for coastal communities around the world and their risk of being exposed to flooding and erosion.”
The pace of melting was found to vary greatly between and within the two polar ice caps, but it is rising, with the majority of the rise occurring in the last seven years of the study.
Antarctica’s contribution to the sea level rise from the ice caps was substantially smaller at 0.3 inches, or about 33%, compared to Greenland’s contribution of nearly a half inch, or 66%.
The rate of mass loss in Greenland was 169 billion tonnes per year, however there was a significant interannual range from 86 billion tonnes per year in 2017 to 444 billion tonnes in 2019. West Antarctica, which loses 82 billion tonnes of ice annually, and the Antarctic Peninsula, which loses 13 billion tonnes of ice annually, accounted for the majority of the Antarctic’s ice losses.
East Antarctica, on the other hand, seemed to be gaining ice mass at a rate of 3 billion tonnes per year, making it stand out as the only region under study that maintained a balanced condition, however the researchers cautioned that this region was the most speculative part of the Antarctic picture.
It was “critical to track their contribution to the global mean sea level and drive projections of future sea level rise,” according to the study, to follow the mass balance of the ice sheets and to produce annual updates of Greenland and Antarctica mass balance.
The analysis on Thursday was released on the same day as a report from the Copernicus environmental monitoring program of the European Union, which stated that the last eight years have been the planet’s warmest on record, with 2022 ranking fifth warmest.
Numerous areas saw temperatures surpass records, including Europe, where the summer of 2018 was the warmest on record at 32.8 degrees above average and 30.6-30.8 degrees higher than the previous highest summer, which occurred in 2021.
The majority of Western Europe experienced heatwaves, while temperatures in Britain reached 104 degrees for the first time ever and the average sea surface temperature in Europe’s seas reached the highest level ever observed.
