The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has discovered that Antarctica and Greenland are losing around 318 gigatons of ice every year.
According to a report on Earth.com, NASA's scientists analyzed the changes taking place in Antarctica and Greenland's ice sheets using advanced laser instruments.
The observation revealed a massive change, including small gains in East Antarctica and massive losses in West Antarctica for the past 16 years.
Experts found 14 millimeters of sea-level rise between 2003 and 2019 caused by the overall ice losses from Greenland and Antarctica. However, the data gathered is just one-third of the total amount of the recorded sea-level rise in the world's oceans within this period.
NASA launched the "Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite 2" also called "ICESat-2" in 2018 to conduct detailed and accurate global elevation measurements.
The researchers made a comparison of the data gathered between 2003 and 2009 using the original ICESat and the measurements acquired using ICESat-2 to create a comprehensive portrait of ice sheet changes in Antarctica and Greenland.
Massive meltdown; Antarctica and Greenland are losing 318 gigatons of ice
According to the report of Earth.com, the study conducted by NASA scientists, which was published by the Journal Science, showed that the Greenland ice sheets are losing 200 gigatons of ice per year. Meanwhile, 118 gigatons of ice are melting in Antarctica every year.
It was explained in the report that a single gigaton of ice could cover New York's Central Park, enveloping it in ice more than 1,000 feet thick--higher than the Chrysler Building.
"If you watch a glacier or ice sheet for a month, or a year, you're not going to learn much about what the climate is doing to it," said Ben Smith, a glaciologist at the University of Washington and the lead author of the study.
"We now have a 16-year span between ICESat and ICESat-2 and can be much more confident that the changes we're seeing in the ice have to do with the long-term changes in the climate," he further explained in the report.
To properly measure how much ice has been lost, the researchers developed a new model of ICESat which converts ice sheet volume to mass. A laser altimeter sends 10,000 pulses of light down to Earth's surface per second. It is used by ICESat-2 to accurately measure land elevation. The equipment records how long the light takes to return to the satellite within a billionth of a second.
"These first results looking at land ice confirm the consensus from other research groups, but they also let us look at the details of change in individual glaciers and ice shelves at the same time," said Neumann, an ICESat-2 project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
The results of the study revealed that the ice sheet in Antarctica's interior parts is getting thicker because of increased snowfall. However, the warming of the ocean has also caused ice meltdowns in the Antarctic Peninsula and West Antarctica which outweigh the gains in the interior ice sheet.
