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390 Billion Tons of Snow and Ice Melt Each Year As Globe Warms, Study Suggests (usatoday.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from USA Today, highlighting the key findings from a new study published in the journal Nature: Thanks to global warming, our planet's glaciers continue to melt away, losing up to 390 billion tons of ice and snow per year, a new study suggests. The largest losses were glaciers in Alaska, followed by the melting ice fields in southern South America and glaciers in the Arctic. Glaciers could almost disappear in some mountain ranges by the end of the century, including those in the U.S. The world's seas have risen about an inch in the past 50 years just due to glacier melt alone, according to the study. Since 1961, the world has lost 10.6 trillion tons of ice and snow, the study reported. Melted, that's enough to cover the lower 48 U.S. states in about 4 feet of water.
Contrary to what many American believe, the total surface area of world is much larger than the USA. So the 4 ft of water are just distributed a lot more across the many oceans.
No, it isn't because, as you know, the US isn't under 4 feet of water.
Your comment is hard to follow. The "lower 48" U.S. states comprise about 3 million square kilometers. The surface area of the Earth is a little over 500 million square kilometers. The meltwater from melting glaciers doesn't only go to the lower 48 US states; it equilibrates all around the world.
This is a visualization analogy intended to give the public a quantitative feel for what 10.6 trillion tons of water is. Sort of like expressing data in terms of libraries of congress. It is not anywhere a statement that the melted water did cover the lower 48 U.S. states, and no other part of the world.
Or maybe they mean "lost" like they can't find it, but given the rest of the summary they seem to mean it's melted.
Most native English speakers can understand the different uses of the word "lost". Especially when the very next sentence uses the word "melted". In this case "lost" means lost by melting, the way your ice water loses its ice when it sits on the table. Gone, in the form of ice, but the water comprising the ice is still here.
It takes about five seconds to find contradictory studies, such as "NASA Study: Mass Gains of Antarctic Ice Sheet Greater than Losses," which says "According to the new analysis of satellite data, the Antarctic ice sheet showed a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001. That net gain slowed to 82 billion tons of ice per year between 2003 and 2008." https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-mass-gains-of-antarctic-ice-sheet-greater-than-losses
You can draw your own conclusions.
Nope, the warming from the last ice age peaked about 8000 years ago, and turned into (very slow) cooling, until last century when global warming accelerated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Everyone knows the hockey stick is bogus manipulation of data
Nope, the hockey stick graph has been confirmed by several studies. You can find plenty of references in the wikipedia page above. And if you dismiss all of the data, then what are you going to use to show that "we are still coming out of an ice age" as GP tried to claim?
I work on a satellite system which scans the ocean wave heights globally. Our data shows that the mean sea level from 1993 to mid-2017 rose at 3.3 mm/year.