We are losing Ice at a record rate

Topics: Environment / Climate

Sources: ESA - European Space Agency

Share this post

We are losing Ice at a record rate

A research team – the first to carry out a survey of global ice loss using satellite data – has discovered that the rate at which ice is disappearing across the planet is speeding up. The findings also reveal that 28 trillion tonnes of ice was lost between 1994 and 2017 – equivalent to a sheet of ice 100 metres thick covering the whole of the UK.

A paper, published today in The Cryosphere, describes how a team of researchers led by the University of Leeds in the UK used information from ESA’s ERS, Envisat and CryoSat satellites as well as the Copernicus Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 missions to find that the rate at which Earth has lost ice has increased markedly within the past three decades, from 0.8 trillion tonnes per year in the 1990s to 1.3 trillion tonnes per year by 2017.

Click here to read full article ...