“Ice is steadily disappearing across much of the world, and a majority of the losses are driven by climate change,” a Scientific American article published on Monday, January 25, 2021, concludes. (Read it here.)
The article says the melt rate has risen over 50% since the 1990s, from 800 billion to 1.2 trillion metric tons a year, and, “Altogether, the planet lost a whopping 28 trillion tons of ice between 1994 and 2017.”
Those figures come from the first study to calculate “all the ice lost around the globe over the last few decades” from “the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, Arctic and Antarctic sea ice and mountain glaciers all over the world,” relying primarily on satellite data but also on-site observations and modeling. The melting isn’t uniform; Antarctica is actually gaining ice, possibly related to recovery of the “ozone hole” over that continent, while Greenland’s rapid ice loss is a major concern of scientists.
Sea level rise comes from land ice melting into water that flows into the sea, adding to the total volume of sea water. Sea ice also is melting, which impacts wildlife but doesn’t contribute to sea level rise, because it doesn’t add water to the seas that isn’t already there.
The fact mountain glaciers are melting all over the world is plainly visible to visitors to alpine regions (see photo below).
Photo: Forbidden Peak, North Cascades, Washington, in 1960 and 2005
