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Antarcticaand Greenland are losing ice six times faster than in the 1990s , a pair of studies in the journal Nature show .
agree to the international team of climatologists behind the research , the unprecedented rate of melt has already bestow 0.7 inch ( 1.78 centimeters ) to global sea level rise in the last three decennium , putting the major planet on track for the worst - compositor’s case mood heating scenario laid out in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ’s ( IPCC)latest report . The horrific scenario , which predicts a total sea grade rise of 23.6 in ( 60 cm ) by the twelvemonth 2100 , would put hundred of millions of people go in coastal communities at danger of lose their homes — or their lives — to flooding .
A massive iceberg floats on its side in Greenland.
" Every centimetre of ocean tier procession leads to coastal implosion therapy and coastal erosion , disrupting people ’s lives around the major planet , " bailiwick author Andrew Shepherd , a professor of Earth Observation at the University of Leeds in England , said in a statement . " If Antarctica and Greenland continue to track the bad - case climate thaw scenario , they will cause an extra 6.7 in ( 17 curium ) of sea level rise by the end of the century . "
" This would mean 400 million the great unwashed are at peril of annual coastal implosion therapy by 2100 , " Shepherd add together .
For the new studies , a team of 89 scientist valuate ice passing information from 11 artificial satellite that have been monitoring Antarctica and Greenland since the other 1990s . The data created a detailed picture of how much mess each area ’s glacier have lost over the last 30 years , and showed how quickly the persist internal-combustion engine is run into the ocean .
The team find that Greenland and Antarctica have lost a combined 7 trillion tons of ice ( 6.4 trillion measured rafts ) from 1992 to 2017 . Almost all of the lose ice in Antarctica and about half of the mislay ice in Greenland is due to warming ocean body of water melting the bound of glacier , have each region ’s ice sheets to menstruate more quickly toward the ocean . The rest of Greenland ’s water ice departure is due to warm atmosphere temperature , which melt the ice sheets at their surfaces , the research worker said .
The rate of chicken feed loss in each ice sheet also increase substantially over that period , rising from a combined 89 billion tons ( 81 billion metric tons ) per yr in the nineties to 523 billion tons ( 475 billion metrical stacks ) per year in the 2010s .
This six-fold increase in the rate of ice expiration mean that the melting polar ice sheets are creditworthy for a third of all sea floor rise , the researchers say . ( thermic expansion , which causes water to take up more place as it warms , is responsible for much of the remaining sea grade rise . )
The accelerated ice-skating rink loss puts the major planet well on the path toward the IPCC ’s worst - case scenario .
Originally put out onLive scientific discipline .
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