Greenland and Antarctica lost over 12 trillion tonnes of ice

O earth's warming is accelerating the melting of the planet's two main ice layers, but five sixths of this melting does not result from warmer air but from warmer waters affecting the ice layers as glaciers flow into the oceans.

“ The ice layers are melting rapidly,” said the co-author of the study, Eric Rignot, an ice specialist at the University of California, arguing that ice melting in polar regions and rising sea level worldwide will exacerbate the vulnerability of coastal regions.

All this melted ice has become almost three quatricions of water bottles (11.3 quatricions of liters), which has raised the global level of the sea by about 3.1 centimeters since 1979, adding to other climatic factors that also raise the level of the oceans, according to the report.

“ These 3.1 centimeters may not look like much, but for every centimeter of sea level rise, between two and three million more people suffer flooding at least once a year,” said the main author of the study, Ines Otosaka, an ice specialist at the University of Northumbria in the UK.

Ines Otosaka pointed out that the Jakobshavn glacier in Greenland currently retreats up to 50 meters a day.

Previously, an international collaboration of polar scientists, led by the European Space Agency, had already examined the melting of ice layers from the 1990s on the basis of European satellite data.

Now, by incorporating NASA satellites, scientists have managed to map the volumes of the ice layers in Antarctica since 1979 and Greenland since 1972.

The study showed that in the 1970s, 1980s and until the mid-1990s the ice layers were relatively stable, but that during the 2010s melting began to occur and intensified dramatically, according to Ines Otosaka.

“ This is a cause for concern, because it shows that the changes occur with a delay of decades in relation to global warming, which means that we can expect them to continue for a few more decades, even if we can stop the warming of the planet,” said the co-author of the study, Andrew Shepherd, also from the University of Northumbria.

The most significant changes observed by scientists were due to “dynamic processes”, more abrupt and active phenomena than slow and constant melting caused by air.

David Holland, an ice specialist at the University of New York, said that this is what concerns him, “because most of the ice loss is dynamic in nature, exactly what would be expected in a scenario of collapse due to instability of the ice layer.”.

The international team used 45 independent surveys and 27 different satellites to carry out the study.