New Delhi (NVI): Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are currently melting six times faster than they were in the 1990s, according to a new study.
If this continues, the melting will be on track to match the worst-case scenario set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and cause flooding that has the potential to affect hundreds of millions of people by 2100.
The recent research, which involved an international team of 89 polar scientists from 50 organizations and was published in the journal Nature, provides the most comprehensive assessment of the changing ice sheets, ever. NASA and the European Space Agency, through satellite observations and laboratories, have supported these assessments.
The team’s findings indicate that the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have collectively lost 475 billion tons of ice per year in 2010—six times more than the collective loss in the 1990s, which stood at 81 billion tons.
The resulting meltwater also boosted global sea levels by 0.7 inches (17.8 millimeters). Together, the melting polar ice sheets are responsible for a third of all sea-level rise. Of this total sea-level rise, 60 percent resulted from Greenland’s ice loss and 40 percent resulted from Antarctica’s.
However, the satellite observations of polar ice are essential for monitoring and predicting how climate change could affect ice losses and sea-level rise.
The IPCC in its Fifth Assessment Report issued predicted that global sea levels would rise 28 inches (71 centimeters) by 2100. The Ice Sheet Mass Balance Intercomparison Exercise team’s studies show that ice loss from Antarctica and Greenland tracks with the IPCC’s worst-case scenario.
The combined losses from both ice sheets peaked at 552 billion tons per year in 2010 and averaged 475 billion tons per year for the remainder of the decade.
IPCC projections indicate the resulting sea-level rise could put 400 million people at risk of annual coastal flooding by the end of the century. Every centimeter of sea-level rise leads to coastal flooding and coastal erosion, disrupting people’s lives around the planet.
Antarctica’s outlet glaciers are being melted by the ocean, which causes them to rise. Whereas this accounts for the majority of Antarctica’s ice loss and also for half of Greenland’s ice loss; the rest is caused by rising air temperature melting the surface.
Meanwhile, these past few months have also registered record temperatures across Antarctica, Europe, and several other regions around the globe.
