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Antarctica / Re: Ice Apocalypse - MULTIPLE METERS SEA LEVEL RISE
« on: January 25, 2021, 03:24:35 PM »
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jan/25/global-ice-loss-accelerating-at-record-rate-study-finds
Global ice loss accelerating at record rate, study finds
https://tc.copernicus.org/articles/15/233/2021/
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jan/25/global-ice-loss-accelerating-at-record-rate-study-finds
Global ice loss accelerating at record rate, study finds
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The rate of loss is now in line with the worst-case scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s leading authority on the climate, according to a paper published on Monday in the journal The Cryosphere.
Thomas Slater, lead author and research fellow at the centre for polar observation and modelling at the University of Leeds, warned that the consequences would be felt around the world. “Sea level rise on this scale will have very serious impacts on coastal communities this century,” he said.
About 28tn (trillion) tonnes of ice was lost between 1994 and 2017, which the authors of the paper calculate would be enough to put an ice sheet 100 metres thick across the UK. About two thirds of the ice loss was caused by the warming of the atmosphere, with about a third caused by the warming of the seas.
Over the period studied, the rate of ice loss accelerated by 65%, the paper found, from 0.8tn tonnes a year in the 1990s to 1.3 trillion tonnes a year by 2017. About half of all the ice lost was from land, which contributes directly to global sea level rises. The ice loss over the study period, from 1994 to 2017, is estimated to have raised sea levels by 35 millimetres.
https://tc.copernicus.org/articles/15/233/2021/
Quote
Abstract
We combine satellite observations and numerical models to show that Earth lost 28 trillion tonnes of ice between 1994 and 2017. Arctic sea ice (7.6 trillion tonnes), Antarctic ice shelves (6.5 trillion tonnes), mountain glaciers (6.1 trillion tonnes), the Greenland ice sheet (3.8 trillion tonnes), the Antarctic ice sheet (2.5 trillion tonnes), and Southern Ocean sea ice (0.9 trillion tonnes) have all decreased in mass. Just over half (58 %) of the ice loss was from the Northern Hemisphere, and the remainder (42 %) was from the Southern Hemisphere. The rate of ice loss has risen by 57 % since the 1990s – from 0.8 to 1.2 trillion tonnes per year – owing to increased losses from mountain glaciers, Antarctica, Greenland and from Antarctic ice shelves. During the same period, the loss of grounded ice from the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets and mountain glaciers raised the global sea level by 34.6 ± 3.1 mm. The majority of all ice losses were driven by atmospheric melting (68 % from Arctic sea ice, mountain glaciers ice shelf calving and ice sheet surface mass balance), with the remaining losses (32 % from ice sheet discharge and ice shelf thinning) being driven by oceanic melting. Altogether, these elements of the cryosphere have taken up 3.2 % of the global energy imbalance.
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