Global Ice Loss Increases at Record Rate
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
The rate at which ice is disappearing across the planet is speeding up, according to new research.
[...] The figures have been published today (Monday, 25 January) by a research team which is the first to carry out a survey of global ice loss using satellite data.
The 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.
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.
[...] Lead author Dr. Thomas Slater, a Research Fellow at Leeds' Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling , said: "Although every region we studied lost ice, losses from the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets have accelerated the most.
[...] The increase in ice loss has been triggered by warming of the atmosphere and oceans, which have warmed by 0.26C and 0.12C per decade since the 1980, respectively. The majority of all ice loss was driven by atmospheric melting (68 %), with the remaining losses (32%) being driven by oceanic melting.
[...] Just over half (58 %) of the ice loss was from the northern hemisphere, and the remainder (42 %) was from the southern hemisphere.
Journal Reference:
Slater, Thomas, Lawrence, Isobel R., Otosaka, Ines N., et al. Review article: Earth's ice imbalance [open], The Cryosphere (DOI: https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-15-233-2021)
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