Earth is losing 39 cubic miles of ice per year which equals 150 Billion tons of ice annually according to a new study at The University of Colorado-Boulder.
The research effort is the first comprehensive satellite study of the contribution of the world’s melting glaciers and ice caps to global sea level rise and indicates they are adding roughly 0.4 millimeters annually, said CU-Boulder physics Professor John Wahr, who helped lead the study. The measurements are important because the melting of the world’s glaciers and ice caps, along with Greenland and Antarctica, pose the greatest threat to sea level increases in the future, Wahr said.
Updated New Nature publication
The high mountains of Asia, in particular, show a mass loss of only 4 ± 20 Gt yr−1 for 2003–2010, compared with 47–55 Gt yr−1 in previously published estimates2, 5. For completeness, we also estimate that the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, including their peripheral GICs, contributed 1.06 ± 0.19 mm yr−1 to sea level rise over the same time period. The total contribution to sea level rise from all ice-covered regions is thus 1.48 ± 0.26 mm −1, which agrees well with independent estimates of sea level rise originating from land ice loss and other terrestrial sources6.
By using satellite measurements taken with the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment or
GRACE a joint effort of NASA and Germany, to calculate that the world’s glaciers and ice caps had lost about 148 billion tons, or about 39 cubic miles of ice annually from 2003 to 2010. The total does not count the mass from individual glacier and ice caps on the fringes of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets -- roughly an additional 80 billion tons.
Melted down, just seven years of that lost ice would cover the entire United States in a foot and a half of water.
This explains how the GRACE system is able to be so accurate:
“This is the first time anyone has looked at all of the mass loss from all of Earth’s glaciers and ice caps with GRACE,” said Wahr. “The Earth is losing an incredible amount of ice to the oceans annually, and these new results will help us answer important questions in terms of both sea rise and how the planet’s cold regions are responding to global change.”
snip
Launched in 2002, two GRACE satellites whip around Earth in tandem 16 times a day at an altitude of about 300 miles, sensing subtle variations in Earth's mass and gravitational pull. Separated by roughly 135 miles, the satellites measure changes in Earth's gravity field caused by regional changes in the planet's mass, including ice sheets, oceans and water stored in the soil and in underground aquifers.
The contraction of the Arctic ice cap is
accelerating global warming. Snow and ice usually form a protective, cooling layer over the Arctic. When that covering melts, the earth absorbs more sunlight and gets hotter. What my house will look like as the Artic sea ice continues to melt.
What Northern Europe will look like as ice melts:
Also see FishOutofWater's excellent post on Ice Collapse and Deadly Weather.
I know we have other important things to consider such as The 3 stooges republican primary but I think we need to focus on some viable solutions to climate change and it's effects such as rising water, deadly weather etc. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that there will be 150 million environmental refugees by 2050. We don't have enough time for time intensive solutions.
My solution is here.