On Earth, the amount of ice lost each year is equal to a monstrous, over six-mile-high ice cube looming over New York City.
And this ice loss is accelerating.
In research published Monday in the scientific journal The Cryosphere, earth scientists concluded the planet lost a prodigious 28 trillion tonnes of ice between 1994 and 2017. This means ice mass is melting away, like a shrinking glacier. Since the 1990s, the rate of annual ice loss has increased by 57 percent.
"Over the past three decades, ice has been lost from every corner of our planet," said Andrew Shepherd, a professor of earth observation at the University of Leeds and a coauthor of the research.
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Mashable India
Global sea levels are expected to rise between two to seven feet (0.6 meters to 2.1 meters) -- and possibly more -- over the course of the 21st century.
And by 2050, land that is currently home to about 300 million people will fall below the elevation of the average annual coastal flood -- meaning they could face severe floods at least once a year. By 2100, land that is home to 200 million people could sit permanently below the high tide line, rendering those coastal areas all but unlivable.
"The results indicate that, yes, a great deal more people are on vulnerable land than we thought," said Benjamin Strauss, one of the study's co-authors and CEO of non-profit organization Climate Central. He added that these affected regions need to take immediate action to avoid the impending "economic and humanitarian catastrophe."
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CNN
New federal estimates say global sea levels could rise faster than previously thought, and the rise may be even worse in many coastal regions of the United States.
A new report, written by scientists with several federal agencies and universities, says that under a worst-case scenario, climate change could raise the oceans an average of more than 8 feet by 2100, about 20 inches more than a previous federal estimate published in 2012. The best case now projected would be an average of about a foot.
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The six scenarios are based on United Nations models of future greenhouse gas emissions, depending on whether countries rapidly slash pollution or continue burning fossil fuels as usual. The authors determined that the worst-case rise of more than 8 feet has only a 0.1 percent chance of occurring by 2100, even under a business-as-usual emissions scenario, but a rise of more than 1.5 feet is near certain with high emissions.
The increase in the estimates for global sea rise was partly due to new research on the Antarctic ice sheet, which is melting faster and appears to be more fragile than previously estimated, suggesting that some of the more pessimistic scenarios are increasingly likely.
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Sea levels have already risen by more than 8 inches globally since 1880, with 3 inches coming since 1993. Tidal flooding "has increased by an order of magnitude over the past several decades," the report says, "turning it from a rare event into a recurrent and disruptive problem."
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"Even if society sharply reduces emissions in the coming decades," the authors write, "sea level will most likely continue to rise for centuries."
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Inside Climate News
