Since 1992, Antarctica Has Lost 3 Trillion Metric Tons Of Ice - 1/3" Global Sea Level Rise
Between 1992 and 2017, the Antarctic ice sheet shed roughly 3 trillion metric tons of ice—causing the global average sea level to rise nearly a third of an inch (7.6 millimeters).
That’s a lot of ice. There’s another number, though, that’s more pressing: how fast Antarctica is now melting. According to a paper published in the journal Nature on Wednesday (June 13), authored by a team of 84 scientists at 44 scientific institutions around the world, the rate of ice loss from Antarctic is speeding up, fast.
Between 1992 and 1997, it was losing ice at an average rate of 49 billion metric tons (49 gigatons) a year. By a decade later, between 2002 and 2007, that average annual loss went up to 73 billion metric tons—a 24-billion-metric-ton increase. But another decade after that, between 2012 and 2017, that number was 219 billion metric tons of ice lost per year. That’s an 146-billion-metric-ton leap.
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That leap in ice loss is concentrated in West Antarctica, where losses jumped from 53 billion metric tons of ice in 1992 to 159 billion metric tons in 2017. Scientists have long been eyeing the West Antarctic ice sheet as the least stable region of the continent, and a NASA-lead study confirmed that ice losses were accelerating there earlier this year. East Antarctica appears to be losing ice more steadily.
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https://qz.com/1304990/the-antarctic-ice-sheet-has-lost-3-trillion-metric-tons-of-ice-since-1992-causing-7-6-millimeters-of-sea-level-rise/
