&imwidth=800&imheight=600&format=webp&quality=medium "11 trillion tons of ice has vanished from Greenland and Antarctica. That's not the worst part")
Ice loss at the poles is a reality. But scientists have struggled to know how much of it is already gone. A new study has provided the most detailed analysis of this loss using data gathered by satellites. Published in the journal Scientific Data on Wednesday (Sep 16), the study has revealed that the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have lost 11 trillion tons of ice over the last 50 years. Needless to say, they have led to a rise in sea levels.
The bigger problem here is that this has primarily happened because of the melting glaciers and not surface melt. This is when liquid water is produced on the surface of ice sheets, glaciers, and sea ice because of rising air temperatures and solar radiation. The main culprits are the glaciers that are rapidly losing water into the sea.
Satellite observations of the poles
Several satellites monitor the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, and the observations are used to track ice loss in these regions. Lead author Inès Otosaka, an assistant professor at Northumbria University, told Gizmodo that there are about 50 published estimates of ice loss, each carried out in a different way. To carry out a comprehensive review, the team combined all the independent estimates to create "one dataset and assessment of how the ice sheets have evolved over the past five decades.”
A total of 42 independent estimates of ice sheet mass balance were used for this, taken from satellite observations of ice sheet flow, volume, and gravitational attraction. This gave them an estimate of how much mass Greenland and Antarctica had lost since the 1970s. The figure that was revealed was shocking. They noted that a combined 11.3 trillion tons of ice has vanished between 1979 and 2023.
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"If you put that into context, it’s about enough ice to fill a cube that would be 23 kilometres (14 miles) in height," she said. This has caused global average sea levels to rise by about 1 inch. Even though it looks small, the finding indicates that Greenland and Antarctica have become key drivers of sea level rise.
How this ice loss was happening was also surprising. Typically, surface melting and outflow are the two methods by which ice loss happens. In the case of Greenand nd Antarctica, the reason was the latter, triggered by ocean temperatures. This suggests that 84 per cent of the combined ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica was happening because of glaciers that were releasing ice into the ocean, while surface melting contributed just 16 per cent.
