A report released this Wednesday by the European Space Agency (ESA) reveals that polar ice loss in Greenland and Antarctica has increased fivefold since the 1990s and is responsible for a quarter of the rise in sea levels.
According to the report, the island of Greenland (Danish Autonomous Region) and Antarctica lost 7.56 billion tons of ice between 1992 and 2020, with a melting point in 2019 with the loss of 612 billion tons of ice, caused in part by an Arctic heat wave.
Since 1992, the melting of the poles has led to a rise in global mean sea level of 2.1 cm.
If polar ice loss continues at this rate, global mean sea levels could rise by 14.8 to 27.2 centimeters by the end of the century, according to projections from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The report released this Wednesday by the ESA, most recently by IMBIE – Ice Sheet Mass Balance Intercomparison Exercise, which balances the mass of the ice sheet, collects data from satellites such as CryoSat, from ESA, and the constellation Sentinel-1 of the European Union Earth observation program Copernicus.
IMBIE is funded by ESA and its North American counterpart NASA.
Another report, from the Copernicus Climate Change Monitoring Service, concluded that Greenland experienced extreme weather events in 2022, including exceptional heat and rainfall in September, a time of year when snow is more common, with temperatures reaching 8°C that month. C above average. , a record since at least 1979.
The region was hit by three separate heat waves that caused a record thaw.
According to the same report, Southern Ocean ice reached its “smallest minimum extent” in February 2022 in 44 years of satellite records.
Source: DN
