Earth’s ice is melting faster today than in the mid-1990s, new research suggests, as climate change nudges global temperatures ever higher. Altogether, an estimated 28 trillion metric tons of ice have melted away from the world’s sea ice, ice sheets and glaciers since the mid-1990s. Annually, the melt rate is now about 57 per cent faster than it was three decades ago, scientists report in a study published Monday in the journal ‘The Cryosphere’.
“It was a shock to see such a big enhance in simply 30 years,” stated co-author Thomas Slater, a glaciologist at Leeds College in Britain. The land ice melted in Antarctica, Greenland, and mountain glaciers added so much water in the 30 year period that the overall global sea level rose by 3.5 centimetres. The melting of mountain glaciers contributed to 22 per cent of the yearly ice loss, which is substantial since only about 1 per cent of all ice atop the land, Slater said.
Across the Arctic, sea ice is also shrinking to new summertime lows. Last year saw the second-lowest sea ice extent in more than 40 years of satellite monitoring. As sea ice vanishes, it exposes dark water which absorbs solar radiation, rather than reflecting it back out of the atmosphere. This phenomenon, known as Arctic amplification, boosts regional temperatures even further. The global atmospheric temperature has risen by about 1.1 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times. But in the Arctic, the warming rate has been more than twice the global average in the last 30 years.
