The World's Ice Is Melting 65 Percent Faster Than in the '90s, According to Study
Ice is melting all over the world. No surprise there. But, if you want to be more stressed about it than usual tonight, well, ice is melting 65 percent faster than it was during the '90s. That's according to a study by a University of Leeds-led team.
According to the researchers, ice is disappearing at faster rates. In fact, Earth lost 28 trillion tons of ice between 1994 and 2016. What's causing the melting? Climate change. The warming of the atmosphere and oceans have gone up by 0.26°C and 0.12°C per decade since 1980.
While the biggest losses came from the Arctic Sea ice and Antarctic ice shelves at 7.6 trillion tons and 6.5 trillion tons, respectively.
"Although every region we studied lost ice, losses from the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets have accelerated the most," said the study's lead author and Leeds' Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling research fellow Dr. Thomas Slater.
He continues, "The ice sheets are now following the worst-case climate warming scenarios set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Sea-level rise on this scale will have very serious impacts on coastal communities this century."
Ice melting, of course, leads to rising sea levels which threatens coastal communities and natural habitats. That's not good news at all for humanity.
