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Satellites show Earth lost more than 12 trillion tons of ice from Greenland, Antarctica in 47 years

nbcdfw.com · 7h · first reportShare

About 12.5 trillion 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 them 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.” Huge numbers for ice melt, people flooded The numbers behind the melt are both mind-bogglingly huge and deceptively small. All that melted