Global warming might be a myth for some people. However, science one cannot always question science. According to a recent research, the Earth has lost about 28 trillion tonnes of ice between the years 1994 and 2017. Researchers from Imperial College London and the University of Leeds and Edinburgh have used satellite data and other models for the first time to study the impact of the climate crisis on ice around the globe..
Scanning the ice coverage in Antarctica, Greenland as well as glaciers across the globe, it has been concluded that around 60 percent of the ice melting has occurred above the equator, making it the worst hit area. Large amounts of ice melting from Antarctica, Greenland and various glaciers are said to have contributed to a 3.5cm rise in global sea levels. These findings come almost a week after researchers at Ohio State University found that Greenland’s ice sheet might have passed a point of no return. This essentially means that Greenland will continue to lose ice even if global temperatures stopped rising.
According to Dr Isobel Lawrence, a researcher at the University of Leeds, “In the two decades since the 1990s, we’ve seen this estimate go up from 0.8 to 1.2 trillion tonnes of ice a year, so that’s a 57 percent increase in one decade. If that continues, which it’s expected to because emissions are continuing to rise, then all of this melt is going to continue to accelerate. That has consequences for sea level rise.”
The increase in sea temperatures have been one of the main reasons for the rapid depletion of ice from Antarctica. On the other hand, atmospheric temperatures are the primary cause of ice loss from inland glaciers in areas like the Himalayas. The loss of ice in Greenland however, is said to be triggered by a combination of rising sea and atmospheric temperatures.
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