Mashable – “On Earth, the amount of ice lost each year is equal to a monstrous, over six-mile-high ice cube looming over New York City. And this ice loss is accelerating. In research published Monday in the scientific journal The Cryosphere, earth scientists concluded the planet lost a prodigious 28 trillion tonnes of ice between 1994 and 2017. This means ice mass is melting away, like a shrinking glacier. Since the 1990s, the rate of annual ice loss has increased by 57 percent.  “Over the past three decades, ice has been lost from every corner of our planet,” said Andrew Shepherd, a professor of earth observation at the University of Leeds and a coauthor of the research. Accelerating ice loss threatens to redraw maps all over the globe, because much of this melted ice — from Greenland, Antarctica, and other glaciers — flows into the ocean. Already, sea levels have risen by some eight to nine inches since 1880. Yet if this current rate of ice loss acceleration is sustained, the planet’s sea levels could rise by another 27 to 31 inches (around 70 to 80 cm) by the century’s end, explained Bob Kopp, the director of the Institute of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences at Rutgers University. Kopp had no involvement with the study.  For much of the 20th century, sea levels rose annually by some 1.4 millimeters a year. But in recent years, that jumped to 3.6 millimeters. “It’s accelerating,” said Kopp.

SOURCE – Review article: Earth’s ice imbalance. The Cryosphere, 15, 233–246, 2021 . https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-15-233-2021 Slater, T. and Lawrence, I. R. and Otosaka, I. N. and Shepherd, A. and Gourmelen, N. and Jakob, L. and Tepes, P. and Gilbert, L. and Nienow, P.Received: 12 Aug 2020 – Discussion started: 14 Aug 2020 – Revised: 18 Nov 2020 – Accepted: 18 Nov 2020 – Published: 25 Jan 2021.  “We combine satellite observations and numerical models to show that Earth lost 28 trillion tonnes of ice between 1994 and 2017. Arctic sea ice (7.6 trillion tonnes), Antarctic ice shelves (6.5 trillion tonnes), mountain glaciers (6.1 trillion tonnes), the Greenland ice sheet (3.8 trillion tonnes), the Antarctic ice sheet (2.5 trillion tonnes), and Southern Ocean sea ice (0.9 trillion tonnes) have all decreased in mass. Just over half (58 %) of the ice loss was from the Northern Hemisphere, and the remainder (42 %) was from the Southern Hemisphere. The rate of ice loss has risen by 57 % since the 1990s – from 0.8 to 1.2 trillion tonnes per year – owing to increased losses from mountain glaciers, Antarctica, Greenland and from Antarctic ice shelves. During the same period, the loss of grounded ice from the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets and mountain glaciers raised the global sea level by 34.6 ± 3.1 mm. The majority of all ice losses were driven by atmospheric melting (68 % from Arctic sea ice, mountain glaciers ice shelf calving and ice sheet surface mass balance), with the remaining losses (32 % from ice sheet discharge and ice shelf thinning) being driven by oceanic melting. Altogether, these elements of the cryosphere have taken up 3.2 % of the global energy imbalance.”