{"id":543,"date":"2018-12-20T03:44:37","date_gmt":"2018-12-20T08:44:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/williamcolgan.net\/blog\/?p=543"},"modified":"2024-06-20T12:41:36","modified_gmt":"2024-06-20T17:41:36","slug":"eight-trillion-tonnes-of-arctic-ice-lost-since-1971","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/williamcolgan.net\/blog\/?p=543","title":{"rendered":"Eight trillion tonnes of Arctic ice lost since 1971"},"content":{"rendered":"

We have just completed a study that inventories Arctic land ice loss since 1971. It is available open-access in the current issue of Environmental Research Letters<\/em>1<\/sup><\/a>. While we scientists have a pretty good idea of the health — or mass balance — of glaciers and ice sheets — or land ice — since the advent of satellite altimetry in the early 1990s, there is a need for better understanding of land ice health during the pre-satellite era. Our new study estimates the annual ice loss from all glacierized regions north of 55\u00b0N between 1971 and 2017.<\/p>\n

We use in situ data \u2013 mass balance measurements from a handful of continuously monitored glaciers \u2013 as indicators for the health of land ice in seven Arctic regions. These hard-fought in situ data are scarce, they are only measured at between 20 and 44 Arctic glaciers every year. Extrapolating these data to entire regions is statistically challenging without additional information. Fortunately, independent estimates of regional mass balance are available from satellite gravimetry during the 2003 to 2015 period. This permits calibrating in situ and satellite-derived mass balance estimates during the satellite era. This makes our pre-satellite era estimates fairly robust.<\/p>\n