Rate of melt increasing: Polar ice caps see record melting

Ice loss in Greenland and Antarctica has sharply increased since the 1990s, according to a report by the European Space Agency (ESA).

In the past three decades, enormous masses of ice have melted in the Earth's polar regions. In Greenland and Antarctica, more than 7.5 trillion tonnes of ice have been lost in the course of climate change, with annual losses rising fivefold that of the 90s.

This corresponds to an ice cube with an edge length of about 20 kilometres, resulting in sea levels rising by 21 mm since 1992.

While the melting of polar ice was only responsible for about 5.6% of the sea level rise at the beginning of the 1990s, today it accounts for around a quarter of the rise.

Since 1992, the polar ice sheets have been losing more ice each year. The seven years in which the most ice has melted are all in the last decade.

Melting reached a peak in 2019 during a summer heat wave in the Arctic. In total, 444 billion tonnes of polar ice (excluding surrounding sea ice) melted that year.

This is the conclusion of an ESA- and NASA-funded research project at the University of Leeds in England, which includes an international team of polar and climate researchers.