(CNN) the earth ice sheets Enough ice has been lost over the past 30 years to create a 12-mile-high ice cube, according to new research.
The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, which contain nearly all of the world’s freshwater ice, are shrinking at an alarmingly fast pace, according to a report On Thursday from a team of international scientists.
By combining data from 50 satellite surveys of Antarctica and Greenland, spanning from 1992 to 2020, scientists with the Ice Mass Equilibration Comparison Exercise, or IMBIE, were able to track changes in ice sheet size and ice flow.
They found that the melting of the ice sheet has increased six-fold over the past 30 years, as record levels of planet-warming pollution drive global temperatures.
The seven worst years of polar ice cap melt have occurred in the past decade.
The Store Glacier on the Greenland Ice Sheet.
In all, the polar ice sheets lost more than 8.3 trillion tons of ice between 1992 and 2020, according to the report.
The report found that the worst year for ice sheet loss was 2019, when ice sheets were lost 675 billion tons of ice. These losses were driven by the Arctic heat wave, which saw 489 billion tons of the Greenland ice sheet fall.
Ice loss is having a huge impact on the oceans, which is increasing sea levels by 21 millimeters (less than an inch), according to the report. Ice sheet melt now accounts for a quarter of the total sea level rise – a fivefold increase since the 1990s.
“This is an enormous amount of ice,” study lead author Ines Otosaka and research fellow at the University of Leeds told CNN. “This is very worrying, of course, because 40% of the world’s population lives in coastal areas,” she said.
The rate of melting in Antarctica is much faster than it was in the 1990s.
Scientists found that the rate of melting of the Antarctic ice sheet has slowed, but remains much faster than it was in the 1990s.
The report identified the Antarctic Peninsula and West Antarctica – a site Turbulent Thwaites Glaciernicknamed the “doomsday” glacier for its potential destruction Impact on sea level rise – such as the areas where most of the continent’s melting was occurring.
Otosaka expects the Greenland ice sheet to continue losing ice, but said it’s not yet clear what might happen to the Antarctic ice sheet.
“In Antarctica, we have more uncertainty in the future,” she said. “We have what we call some low-probability but high-impact mechanisms that could be triggered if we go beyond a certain level of warming.”
She added that this could lead to a significant rise in sea level in the future.
IMBIE Scholars will update their assessment each year.
If the world reaches certain warming limits, Otosaka said, this could trigger important and potentially irreversible feedback mechanisms.
“We really need strong government policies to limit future global warming and lower the concentration of greenhouse gases,” she added.
The European Space Agency, which is helping with NASA fund IMBIE research, said in a statement: “There is no doubt that climate change is causing the polar ice sheets to melt, thereby raising sea levels and endangering coastal regions around the world.”
Scientists at IMBIE plan to update the assessment each year.
“We’re finally at the stage where we can continually update our assessments of the ice sheet’s mass balance because there are enough satellites in space to monitor them, which means people can benefit from our findings right away,” Andrew Shepherd, professor at Northumbria University and founder of IMBIE , in a statement.
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