About 12.5 trillion tons (11.3 trillion metric tons) of ice from glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica have melted since 1979, which is enough frozen water to stack ice five feet deep across the continental United States, according to a major scientific report.
A warming Earth is accelerating the melting of the planet’s two major ice sheets, with five-sixths of the melt not coming from hotter air, but from warmer waters eating away at the ice sheets from below and the sides, with glaciers flowing into the oceans, according to a study in Wednesday’s journal Scientific Data. That’s bad news for future sea level rise, the study’s authors said.
“The ice sheets are melting away fast,” said study co-author Eric Rignot, an ice scientist at University of California, Irvine. “We are melting the polar regions, sea level is rising worldwide and will exacerbate the vulnerability of coastal regions.”
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Wait, a ton and a metric ton are separate units of measure?
It’s actually three different ones:
- metric ton (1000 kg)
- American short ton (2000 lb = ~907 kg)
- British long ton (2240 lb = ~1016kg)
And there where many more which is actually quite interesting
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Which gives just over 3 cm rise in ocean levels. In the same time period we managed to extract about three times as much water from aquifers globally. That’s a lot more water than I’m willing to drink.
