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390 Billion Tons of Snow and Ice Melt Each Year As Globe Warms, Study Suggests (usatoday.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the cause-and-effect dept.

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.

4 of 172 comments (clear)

  1. Out of? by SlaveToTheGrind · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Some representative estimates of just the two ice sheets:
    - 26,500,000 gigatons in Antarctica
    - 2,900,000 gigatons in Greenland

    So, conservatively ignoring that TFS includes "snow loss" (wut?) and says most of the ice loss was from glaciers in Alaska: 390 / 29,400,000 = (whips out slide rule) 0.0013%.

    But that wouldn't make for nearly as scary of a headline.

  2. Why does this take a study? by bradley13 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Depending on who you believe, the average sea level is rising somewhere around 2mm per year. Around 1mm per year is attributable to thermal expansion of the oceans. The rest must be melt water from glaciers and snow on land.

    So, check my math: The surface area of the oceans is 3.4 * 10^8 square kilometers, or 3.4 * 10^14 square meters. Each millimeter of sea level rise then corresponds to 3.4 * 10^11 cubic meters, which happens to be 340 billion tons of water. Pretty close to their 390 billion tons.

    So their figure makes sense. I suppose it's useful as confirmation, but it's hardly anything new or unexpected. But the big numbers impress clueless journalists...

    --
    Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
  3. Re:Bullshit. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

    It a visual analogy meant to create fear. That we're having the discussion about the analogy shows how pointless it is for any other reason.

  4. Re: We are still coming out of an ice age by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    global warming is no more leftist than Team Trump building gas chambers for Muslims.