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Melting glaciers behind nearly 2cm in sea level rises [1]

['Rob Hutchins']

Date: 2025-02-20 12:10:58+00:00

The melting ice from glaciers worldwide is leading to an increased loss of regional freshwater resources and causing global sea levels to rise at “ever-greater rates” by as much as 2cm over the course of this century alone, a decades-long study has revealed.

According to a new study led by researchers from the University of Edinburgh and the University of Zurich, glaciers have been losing 273 billion tonnes of ice each year for the last 25 years.

Separate from the continental ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, it was as recently as 2000 that glaciers once covered an area of 705,221 square kilometres and contained some 121,728 billion tonnes of ice globally. Since then, however, they have lost around 5% of their global ice cover.

On a regional scale, glaciers on the Antarctic and Subantarctic Islands have lost around 2% of their ice while those in Central Europe have witnessed a loss of 39%. Overall, glacier mass loss is about 18% larger than the loss of ice from the Greenland Ice Sheet and more than twice that from the Antarctic Ice Sheet.

As such, glaciers rank as the second-largest contributor to global sea level rise, following ocean warming. They are also natural indicators of climate change and play a vital role in many communities, providing vital water resources, especially during dry seasons.

“To put this in perspective, the 273 billion tonnes of ice lost in one single year amounts to what the entire global population consumes in 30 years, assuming three litres per person per day,” said Michael Zemp, a professor at the University of Zurich’s department of geography.

The study – Community estimate of global glacier mass changes from 2000 to 2023 – has been published this week in the scientific journal, Nature.

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[1] Url: https://oceanographicmagazine.com/news/melting-glaciers-behind-nearly-2cm-in-sea-level-rises/

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