Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are melting at an accelerated pace, with new international findings showing annual ice loss now three times higher than three decades ago. As the ice shifts from land to the ocean, global sea levels rise accordingly.
Researchers analyzed data from fifty different satellite sources. Greenland’s ice loss has intensified in recent years. From 2017 through 2020, the average annual melt was about 20 percent higher than in the early 2010s and more than seven times the level seen in the early 1990s.
Greenland loses seven times more ice per year than in the 1990s
The findings describe a grim trend, according to Ruth Mottram, a climate scientist at the Danish Meteorological Institute. She noted that Greenland is shedding increasing amounts of ice.
The study’s lead author, Ines Otosaka, a glaciologist at the University of Leeds, linked the rapid ice loss to human-caused climate change.
Change in the thickness of the Greenland ice sheet
Between 1992 and 1996, both Antarctica and Greenland contained roughly 99 percent of the world’s freshwater ice. The study shows that total annual melt rose to about 410 billion tons from 2017 to 2020, according to Earth System Science Data.
“Unprecedented in modern times”
Twila Moon, assistant chief scientist at the US National Snow and Ice Center who was not involved in the study, called the trends devastating. She said the observed ice loss rates are unprecedented in recent history.
Since 1992, these two ice masses have contributed a staggering amount of freshwater to the oceans. The new numbers illustrate the scale: enough to fill the United States with roughly three feet of water, or to submerge France by about fifty feet.
Yet the world’s oceans are vast, and the overall sea level rise since 1992 reflects multiple contributing factors. The ice-sheet melt accounts for around one-quarter of the rise, with the remainder driven by warmer water expansion and glacier melt.
A large team of more than 65 scientists has tracked ice loss using NASA and European Space Agency data over several years. The current study adds three more years of data and confirms that Greenland’s ice sheet is melting while Antarctica’s melt rate continues to accelerate. Otosaka noted that seventeen satellite missions and three independent techniques—radar, ground observations, and computer simulations—arrived at a consistent conclusion: Greenland is losing ice rapidly, and Antarctica is accelerating.
From 2017 to 2020, Greenland’s annual ice loss was about 283 billion tons, compared with roughly 235 billion tons per year in the 2012–2016 period.
The new figures also show that melting is slowing in parts of Antarctica, which has far more ice than Greenland. This regional variation is influenced by shorter-term climate fluctuations, Mottram explained, but the long-term trend still points to ongoing acceleration in Antarctica.
Antarctica loses about 127 billion tons of ice per year from 2017 to 2020, 23 percent less than at the start of the decade, but 64 percent more overall than in the early 1990s.
Antarctica shows 64% higher annual ice loss than in the early 1990s
Mark Serreze, director of the U.S. Snow and Ice Center, cautioned about wild cards in the south, especially the behavior of the Thwaites Glacier, sometimes called the Doomsday Glacier.
The implications for sea level are stark. Waleed Abdalati, a former NASA chief scientist, warned that rising seas will affect hundreds of millions of people and could carry a heavy economic cost.
A commentary on the study described the findings as not surprising yet deeply troubling. It highlighted how satellite observations, fieldwork, and models collectively show the ice responding rapidly to climate change.
For context, the reference work guiding the study is Earth System Science Data, 2023. (Citation attribution: ESSD, 2023.)
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Note on data sources: the environmental science community maintains ongoing datasets and shared methodologies to monitor ice mass and sea level changes across the globe. This study adds new years of data and reinforces the urgent understanding that polar ice dynamics are shifting quickly in response to warming temperatures.