ONTARIO – The world’s glaciers are melting at an accelerating rate, a study said.
A French-led team assessed the behavior of nearly all documented ice streams on the planet.
The researchers found them to have lost almost 270 billion tons of ice a year over the opening two decades of the 21st Century.
The meltwater produced now accounts for about a fifth of global sea-level rise, the scientists told Nature journal.
“Over the last 20 years, we’ve seen that glaciers have lost about 267 gigatons (Gt) per year. So, if we take that amount of water and we divide it up across the island of Ireland, that’s enough to cover all of Ireland in three meters of water each year,” Robert McNabb, from the universities of Ulster and Oslo said.
“And the total loss is accelerating. It’s growing by about 48Gt/yr, per decade,” he added.(BBC)
