As if the world hasn't had enough of the coronavirus crisis already, there's some more unsettling news. And it's something humans have been aware of for a long time.?
Climate change is wreaking havoc in Greenland and Antarctica, and earth has already lost 6.4 trillion tons of ice in the past three decades.?
A new report is based on observations from 11 satellite missions monitoring the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.??
The report states that?if the present trend in the two regions continues, the "worst-case" scenario of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) may come true. The IPCC had predicted an extra 6.7 inches (17 centimetres) of sea-level rise by 2100.
The finding of the study was published in the journal Nature. The IMBIE team assessed 26 surveys to ascertain the ice melting pattern of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets between 1992 and 2018.
"Every centimetre of sea-level rise leads to coastal flooding and coastal erosion, disrupting people's lives around the planet," study author Andrew Shepherd, a professor of Earth Observation at the University of Leeds in England, said in a statement.
"If Antarctica and Greenland continue to track the worst-case climate warming scenario, they will cause an extra 6.7 inches (17 cm) of sea-level rise by the end of the century."?
According to the scientists, the warming ocean waters are responsible for the lost ice as it melts the edges of glaciers, causing each region's ice sheets to flow more quickly toward the sea. The findings were published by an international team of 89 polar scientists from 50 organisations, and are the most comprehensive assessment to date of the changing ice sheets,
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the European Space Agency supported the study undertaken by the IMBIE team.? ?