An Antarctic iceberg. Scientists estimate West Antarctica is losing between 60 and 150 billion tons of ice per year.
Ice currently covers more than 10 percent of our watery planet, yet its volume is continuing to decline at a staggering pace in response to our warming world.
A new NASA interactive tool lets you take a close-up tour of some of the places around our planet where climate change is taking a toll on Earth’s ice cover, including:
• Greenland, where the massive Ilulissat Glacier is depositing 35 to 50 cubic kilometers of icebergs into the ocean each year, raising sea level (a cubic kilometer is about
264.2 billion gallons, enough to fill 400,000 Olympic-size pools)
• The Arctic, where sea ice continues to decline in both area and volume
• Antarctica, where massive ice shelves the size of some small U.S. states have collapsed in recent years
Experience the Global Ice Viewer: http://climate.nasa.gov/GlobalIceViewer/index.cfm
Provided by JPL/NASA
