Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica lose mass six times faster than in the 1990s, thanks to warmer conditions.
Greenland and Antarctica lost 6.4 trillion tons of ice from 1992 to 2017, and that was enough to increase the sea level in the world by 17.8 millimeters.
Today, ice sheets contribute a third of sea level rise while their contribution in the 1990s was quite small - about five percent. This has important implications for the future, for coastal flooding or for erosion.
A team of scientists has analyzed pole measurements taken from the air over the past three decades. These are satellites that monitored the change in volume, movement and weight of ice sheets.
The key conclusion of the scientists is that the rate of ice disappearance corresponds to the upper limit of expectations compared to the models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as a reference body in the world.
According to panel estimates from 2014, simulations of global sea level rise then pointed to a mean value of 53 centimeters by 2100.
But new research suggests more pessimistic figures, and by the end of the century, sea level rise would be 17 centimeters higher than the IPCC estimate showed.
If that happens, 400 million people would be at risk of flooding the coast by 2100.
The loss of ice at the South Pole is the result of melting due to the warmer ocean melting the edges of the ice. At the North Pole, the melting of surface ice due to warmer air is an additional factor.
In the rise of sea level of a total of 17.8 mm, the contribution of ice melting in Greenland is responsible for a 10.6 mm increase, and Antarctica by 7.2 mm.
81 billion tons of ice have been lost annually in Greenland and Antarctica since the 1990s.
By the second decade of the 21st century, it had grown to 475 billion tons per year.
This is amazing information ...