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April 20 (UPI) -- The ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica are melting at an accelerating pace causing signifcant sea level rise, according to a three-decade-long study published Thursday. Scientists tracking ice losses from Greenland and the Antarctic over a 29-year period using 50 satellites -- 27 for Greenland and 23 for Antarctica -- found that the polar caps lost 7,563 billion tons of ice between 1992 and 2020 and that the rate of melting is speeding up.
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The study published in the journal Earth System Science Data found the rate of melting more than tripled from 105 billion tons a year during the first four years of the study to 372 billion tons a year between 2016 and 2020 contributing to 0.8 inches to global mean sea level over the 29 years, or about 25% of sea level rise.
The rate of ice loss is now five times higher in Greenland and 25 % higher in Antarctica, compared to the early 1990s.
"All this has profound implications for coastal communities around the world and their risk of being exposed to flooding and erosion," the study's leader, Dr. Ines Otosaka from Britain's Center for Polar Observation and Modelling, told the BBC.
Researchers found large variability in the rate of melting both between and within the two polar ice caps, but that it is increasing and most of the increase occurred in the latter seven years of the study.
Melting from Greenland contributed about a half inch, or 66%, to the sea level rise from the ice caps while Antarctica's was much smaller at 0.3 inches, or about 33%.
In Greenland, the rate of mass loss was 169 billion tons a year but with a major inter-annual variation ranging from 86 billion tons a year in 2017 to 444 billion tons in 2019. In the Antarctic, ice losses were dominated by West Antarctica, which lost 82 billion tons a year, and to a lesser extent, the Antarctic Peninsula where the rate of melting was 13 billion tons a year.
By contrast, East Antarctica appeared to gain ice mass at the rate of 3 billion tons a year marking it out as the only area studied that maintained a balanced state, although the scientists cautioned that this region was the most uncertain component of the Antarctic picture.
The study calls for continuous monitoring of the mass balance of the ice sheets and production of annual updates of Greenland and Antarctica mass balance saying it was "critical to track their contribution to the global mean sea level and drive projections of future sea level rise."
Thursday's study came the same day as a report from the European Union's Copernicus environmental monitoring program that said the last eight years have been the Earth's warmest on record, with 2022 being the fifth warmest.
A number of regions experienced record-breaking temperatures including Europe, where the summer was the warmest on record at 2.7 degrees above average and 0.6-0.8 degrees higher than the previous warmest summer, in 2021.
Heatwaves struck most of Western Europe and temperatures in Britain climbed above 104 degrees for the first time while the average sea surface temperature in Europe's seas was the highest ever recorded.
