Latest IMBIE Report: Five-fold Increase in Ice Loss from Greenland and Antarctica since the 1990s

Earth System Science Data, 20 April 2023

This week, IMBIE (the Ice Sheet Mass Balance Inter-comparison Exercise) released its third assessment report on the state of the planet’s ice sheets; in which leading cryosphere scientists, supported by the European Space Agency and NASA, consolidate all of the latest satellite data. The IMBIE assessment found that polar ice sheets have lost ice every year since the satellite record began in 1992, and that the seven years with highest melting all occurred in the past decade. The most intense melting to-date took place in 2019, when the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets together lost 612 billion tons of ice due to a summer heatwave in the Arctic. They also found that the melting of polar ice sheets has released more than 7,500 billion tons of ice into global oceans over the past three decades, with two-thirds from Greenland and one-third from Antarctica. More recently, Antarctica has been closing the gap on Greenland.

Most notably, combined ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica has increased five-fold since the 1990s, and now accounts for more than a quarter of all sea level rise (while previously it was only a tiny fraction). “Accelerating ice sheet losses mean we’re looking in the next decade at a marked rise in the rate of sea-level rise,” said Dr. Andrew Shepherd, the founder of IMBIE, in a recent BBC interview. The new report makes clear that reducing emissions is essential to slowing ice loss and limiting long-term, devastating consequences for low-lying coastal communities across the world.

https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/15/1597/2023/