Polar ice sheet melting records have toppled during the past decade
Sebastian Mernild, SDU Climate Cluster, is one of the co-writers on a scientific publication about ice and the large ice sheets
In the early 1990s, ice sheet melting accounted for only a small fraction (5.6 %) of sea level rise. However, there has been a fivefold increase in melting since then, and they are now responsible for more than a quarter (25.6 %) of all sea level rise.
2019 was the record melting year when the ice sheets lost a staggering 612 billion tons of ice. This was driven by an Arctic summer heatwave, which led to record melting from Greenland peaking at 444 billion tonnes that year. Antarctica lost 168 billion tons of ice - the sixth highest on record - due to the continued speedup of glaciers in West Antarctica and record melting from the Antarctic Peninsula. East Antarctic Ice Sheet remained close to a state of balance, as it has throughout the satellite ea.
The polar ice sheets have lost ice in every year of the satellite record, and the seven worst melting years have occurred during the past decade.
You can read the press release from 20 April 2023.
The publication is available on Earth Data Science Data's website.