Speeding glaciers drive half a century of polar ice loss
The longest satellite record ever assembled shows that Greenland and Antarctica have lost 11.3 trillion metric tons of ice since the 1970s, raising global sea level by more than 3 centimeters (1.2 inches)—and that most ...
An international team of polar scientists has produced the most complete picture of ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica to date. The Ice Sheet Mass Balance Inter-comparison Exercise (IMBIE) Team combined 42 independent satellite surveys, drawing on 27 satellite missions and reaching back to 1972 for Greenland and 1979 for Antarctica using the early Landsat archive.
The findings show the two ice sheets lost 11,309 billion metric tons of ice between 1979 and 2023, pushing global sea level up by 31.4 millimeters (1.2 inches). Greenland accounted for the larger share, and Antarctica contributed 13.3 millimeters (0.5 inches).
Strikingly, 84% of the combined loss was driven by glaciers speeding up and pouring more ice into the ocean, with just 16% due to surface melting. The polar ice sheets are now responsible for around a quarter of all global sea level rise.
The assessment was led by Dr. Inès Otosaka and Professor Andrew Shepherd at Northumbria University, and Dr. Tyler Sutterley of the University of Washington Applied Physics Laboratory. It is supported by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and is published in the journal Scientific Data.
Greenland. Credit: Dr. Sammie Buzzard (CPOM / Northumbria University)