Antarctica and Greenland have lost about thousands of gigatons of ice in the past 16 years. The study has been published on Thursday.
How much ice did these two lose?
Scientists stated that the two landmasses had lost about 5,000 gigatons of ice at that time, and it is enough to fill Lake Michigan. In case you do not know, a gigaton is equal to a billion metric tons.
All the data was measured by ICESat-2, a NASA satellite launched in 2018, after a mission from ICESat, which gathered information from 2003 to 2009. Using pieces of information from both of the missions, researchers have managed to calculate the scale of their melting.
2020 will be the hottest year on record
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) stated that the Arctic ice had reached its second-lowest extent back in 2019. NOAA has also said that they think that this year, 2020, will be the hottest year on record, which means that they surpassed the records set back in 2016.
What is the effect of this lost ice?
The loss of ice in Antarctica will result in rising sea levels all around the globe.
Helen Fricker, who is a glaciologist at the University of California-San Diego, stated that: “It will reach us eventually here, even though it is really far away and hard to think about. How much ice we are going to lose, and how quickly we are going to lose it, is a really key thing that needs to be understood so that we can plan.”
