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This loss of ice has caused sea levels to rise by about half an inch between 2003 and 2019. That’s just under a third of the total amount of sea level rise seen in the world’s oceans, according to the study.
And although East Antarctica has gained some ice, that gain is small compared to the total amount of ice lost in the other areas.
According to NASA, the warmer summer temperatures are primarily responsible for this loss of ice. Warm temperatures have melted ice from the surface of glaciers and ice sheets.
NASA says it recorded data from its Ice, Cloud, and Earth Elevation Satellite 2 (ICESat-2), which launched in 2018 to make detailed measurements of global elevation, including over frozen regions of Earth. Those data were then compared to measurements taken by the original ICESat from 2003 to 2009, allowing researchers to generate a comprehensive picture of the complexities of ice sheet change and ideas about the future of Greenland and Antarctica. .
“If you watch a glacier or ice cap for a month or a year, you won’t learn much about what the weather is doing to it,” said Ben Smith, a glaciologist at the University of Washington and lead author of The New Newspaper.
He told NASA: “We now have a 16-year gap between ICESat and ICESat-2 and we can be much more confident that the changes we are seeing on the ice have to do with long-term changes in the climate.”
Alex Gardner, a glaciologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and co-author of the Science article, told NASA that the new analysis reveals the response of ice sheets to changes in climate in large detail, revealing clues as to why and how ice sheets are reacting as they are.
The NASA study also examined ice shelves – the floating ice masses at the downstream end of glaciers. The researchers found that ice shelves are losing mass in West Antarctica, where many of the continent’s fastest-moving glaciers are also found, according to NASA.
NASA explains that melting ice from ice shelves does not raise sea level as it is already floating, just like an ice cube already in a cup filled with water does not overflow the glass when it melts . But the ice shelves provide stability for the glaciers and the ice sheets behind them.
“It’s like an architectural buttress holding up a cathedral,” says Helen Amanda Fricker, a glaciologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, and co-author of the Science article.
She told NASA: “Ice shelves support the ice cap. If you remove the ice shelves, or even dilute them, you are reducing that reinforcing force, so ice to land can flow faster.” .
This study was conducted for 16 years and was published online in Science on April 30.
