Ice-mass Loss

January 26, 2021

Earth is now losing 1.2 trillion tons of ice each year. And it’s going to get worse.

Chris Mooney and Andrew Freedman

NASA

Arctic, Climate Change, Ice melt, Ice-mass Loss, Impacts

Global ice loss has increased rapidly over the past two decades, and scientists are still underestimating just how much sea levels could rise, according to alarming new research published this month.

December 10, 2020

Shift to a Not-So-Frozen North Is Well Underway, Scientists Warn

Henry Fountain

Video by Trent L. Schindler/NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio

Arctic, Climate Change, Ice melt, Ice-mass Loss, Impacts, risk factor, Scientists

“There is no reason to think that in 30 years much of anything will be as it is today,” one of the editors of a new report on the Arctic climate said.

October 30, 2020

Where’s the sea ice? 3 reasons the Arctic freeze is unseasonably late and why it matters

Mark Serreze

GraphicaArtis/Getty Images

Arctic, Climate Change, Ice-mass Loss, risk factor

As the Arctic loses ice and the ocean absorbs more solar radiation, global warming is amplified. That can affect ocean circulation, weather patterns and Arctic ecosystems spanning the food chain, from phytoplankton all the way to top predators.

October 28, 2020

Arctic sea ice loss could trigger huge levels of extra global warming

Adam Vaughan

Alireza Teimoury/Alamy

Climate Change, Ice-mass Loss, risk factor, uncertainty

If Arctic sea ice vanishes in summers by the middle of the century as expected, the world could see a vicious circle that drives enough global warming to almost wipe out the impact of China going carbon neutral.

September 25, 2020

2020 Arctic Sea Ice Minimum at Second Lowest on Record

Kate Ramsayer

NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio

Climate Change, Ice melt, Ice-mass Loss, Impacts, risk factor, Sea-level Rise

This year’s Arctic sea ice cover shrank to the second lowest extent since modern record-keeping began in the late 1970s. Warmer ocean temperatures eat away at the thicker multiyear ice, and also result in thinner ice to start the spring melt season. Melt early in the season results in more open water, which absorbs heat from the Sun and increases water temperatures.

September 8, 2020

Ice Sheet Melting Is Perfectly in Line With Our Worst-Case Scenario, Scientists Warn

Marlowe Hood

ESA/NASA/IMBIE/Planetary Visions

Climate Change, Climate Modelling, Ecological Impacts, Extreme Weather, Flooding, Glaciers, Ice melt, Ice-mass Loss, risk factor, Scenario Analysis, Sea-level Rise, Worst-case Scenario

Mass loss from 2007 to 2017 due to melt-water and crumbling ice aligned almost perfectly with the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change’s (IPCC) most extreme forecasts, which see the two ice sheets adding up to 40 centimetres (nearly 16 inches) to global oceans by 2100, they reported in Nature Climate Change. Such an increase would have a devastating impact worldwide, increasing the destructive power of storm surges and exposing coastal regions home to hundreds of millions of people to repeated and severe flooding.

August 24, 2020

Global Warming Has Caused 28 Trillion Tonnes Of Ice To Melt In Just 23 Years

Ben Taub

Climate Change, Glaciers, Ice melt, Ice-mass Loss, Oceans, Permafrost, risk factor, Sea-level Rise

Between 1994 and 2017, an incredible 28 trillion tonnes (31 trillion tons) of ice was lost from the Earth’s ice sheets, glaciers, and mountains, according to a new report in the journal The Cryosphere. The extent of this worldwide melting has been described as “staggering” by the study authors, who warn that the ongoing loss of ice could lead to catastrophic rises in sea levels. Researchers from University College London, Leeds University, and Edinburgh University studied satellite data in order to determine global changes in ice coverage over several decades. Speaking to The Guardian, study author Andrew Shepherd explained that “in the past researchers have studied individual areas – such as the Antarctic or Greenland – where ice is melting. But this is the first time anyone has looked at all the ice that is disappearing from the entire planet.”

August 19, 2020

The causes of sea-level rise since 1900

Thomas Frederikse, Felix Landerer, Lambert Caron, Surendra Adhikari, David Parkes, Vincent W. Humphrey, Sönke Dangendorf, Peter Hogarth, Laure Zanna, Lijing Cheng & Yun-Hao Wu

SciTechDaily

Sea-level Rise, Climate Change, Climate Modelling, Ice-mass Loss, risk factor, Terrestrial Water Storage, Thermal Expansion

Recent improvements to observational data, our understanding of the main contributing processes to sea-level change and methods for estimating the individual contributions, reconcile summed contributions of ice-mass loss, terrestrial water storage and thermal expansion of the ocean with observed changes in global-mean sea level. The methods described in this paper will contribute to improvements in projections of future sea-level change.

August 18, 2020

Arctic sea ice melting faster than forecast

AFP Staff

Arctic, Climate Change, Climate Modelling, Ice melt, Ice-mass Loss, Oceans, risk factor, Sea-level Rise, Temperature Increase

The Arctic sea ice is melting faster than climate models had predicted, researchers at the University of Copenhagen warned on Tuesday. A recent study from Britain’s University of Lincoln concluded that Greenland’s ice melt alone is expected to contribute 10-12 centimetres to the world’s rising sea levels by 2100. Another group of researchers recently concluded that the melting of Greenland’s ice cap has gone so far that it is now irreversible, with snowfall no longer able to compensate for the loss of ice even if global warming were to end today.

May 20, 2019

The Iceman Cometh

Roger Cooke

Climate Change, Ice melt, Ice-mass Loss, risk factor, Structured Expert Judgement, uncertainty

The title of Eugene O’Neill’s 1939 noir epic on man’s need for self-deception could be the chyron for a recent article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) entitled “Ice Sheet Contributions to Future Sea Level Rise from Structured Expert Judgement” by J.L. Bamber, M. Oppenheimer, R.E. Kopp, W.P. Aspinall, and R.M. Cooke. The PNAS paper describes a structured expert judgment (SEJ) uncertainty quantification of ice sheets’ contribution to sea level rise (SLR) out to 2300 under +2°C and +5°C stabilization scenarios. Expanding on the methodology of Bamber and Aspinall’s groundbreaking 2013 study, the PNAS study again treats individual experts as testable statistical hypotheses, but this time, it targets upper-tail dependence between ice sheet processes. The result is higher median assessments and expanding uncertainties, especially in the upper tail, relative to the Fifth Assessment Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR5). Its potential for capturing a more nuanced and accurate picture of uncertainty, is precisely why Riskthinking.ai employs SEJ in the development of its scenarios tools.

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