Polar Ice Sheets Melting Fast; New Study Links Rise in Sea Level
While global warming is a heated topic, the ice sheets covering the coldest parts of our world are melting at an increasing rate.
A new study released Thursday by the journal Science has details of an international collaboration of scientists found that the thick ice sheets covering Greenland and parts of Antarctica are melting quicker every year.
The climate study was a collaboration of 47 scientists who based their research off of two decades worth of satellite viewings of the ice sheets and measured their rapid transformation that has led to an increased sea level. The scientists compared readings from various satellite-based methods, including radar and laser readings and measurements of the minute gravitational changes around the ice sheets.
Portions of the frozen sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are known to be made up of a mile of thick ice. Between 1992 and 2011 the global average sea levels rose about 20 percent with an average of about seven-sixteenths of an inch.
"Small changes in sea levels in certain places mean very big changes in the kind of protection of infrastructure that you need to have in place," said study contributor Erik Ivins, a geophysicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
The question the scientists are trying to solve is if global warming truly exists based on changes observed on our planet. It's still not known for sure what role buildups or carbon emissions in our atmosphere play in terms of impacting long-term global climate change.
The recent study may help enlighten the public to see that the melting of the polar ice sheets are causing the rise in sea level.
Benjamin Smith, a co-author and research scientist at the University of Washington, made a comment on the melting ice trend seen in the study that was reported by Time Magazine:
"It provides a simpler picture. In the 1990s, not very much was happening. Sometime around 1999, the ice sheets started losing more mass, and probably have been losing mass more rapidly over time since then."
