Worst case scenario

Photo by Emanuel Haas on Unsplash

Global Warming is a slow motion disaster of biblical proportions but now, said disaster has become a worst case scenario due to the massive melting of ice on the poles and Greenland.

Melting on the ice sheets has accelerated so much over the past three decades that it’s now in line with the worst-case climate warming scenarios outlined by scientists. 

A total of 28 trillion metric tons of ice was lost between 1994 and 2017, according to a research paper published in The Cryosphere on Monday. The research team led by the University of Leeds in the U.K. was the first to carry out a global survey of global ice loss using satellite data. 

“The ice sheets are now following the worst-case climate warming scenarios set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” lead author Thomas Slater said in a statement. “Although every region we studied lost ice, losses from the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets have accelerated the most.” 

And this ...

From Antarctica to the Arctic, the world’s ice is melting faster than ever, according to a new global satellite survey that calculated the amount of ice lost from a generation of rising temperatures.

Between 1994 and 2017, the Earth lost 28 trillion metric tons of ice, the survey showed. That is an amount roughly equivalent to a sheet of ice 100 meters thick covering the state of Michigan or the entire U.K.—and the meltwater from so much ice loss has raised the sea level just over an inch or so world-wide, the scientists said.

We talk about ice a lot here on Earther—or more specifically, the growing absence of it. A new study puts what’s happening to the planet in striking perspective. While I can tell you the results show 1.2 trillion tons of ice disappeared every year since 1994, it’s a lot easier to grasp as a visual.

That cube of ice up there towers 6.2 miles (10 kilometers) into the sky like a sunshade over Manhattan and stretches over a huge swath of New Jersey, from Newark Airport to Jersey City. That’s how much we’ve lost to burning fossil fuels on average per year over the past two decades. The skyscrapers of the Financial District and Midtown are toothpicks. More ominously, the cube is getting bigger as ice loss accelerates.

We did this to ourselves.