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Earth's Ice Is Melting: Where and How Fast?

Scientists say ice melt varies by location and accelerates as the planet warms, with Greenland losing ice five times faster and Antarctica 25 percent faster than in the early 1990s.
About 99 percent of land ice is stored in polar ice sheets, mainly Antarctica and Greenland, with Greenland losing nearly 4.9 trillion tonnes of ice between 1992 and 2020, IMBIE satellites show.
Recent decade data show Arctic sea ice thinned from 3.59 metres in 1975 to 1.25 meters in 2012, while mountain glaciers lost about 9.18 trillion tonnes of ice between 1976 and 2024.
Those ice sheets' loss is the main driver of sea-level rise, with global average sea level rising about 20 centimetres between 1901 and 2018, driven by ice-sheet loss and thermal expansion of seawater.
Greenland's records show summer melting has accelerated since 1900, extending into September, while British scientist Ruth Mottram says, 'I do not know if we can really say how much ice Antarctica has lost since the 1950s.

Insights by Ground AI