Mar 8 2006
From The Space Library
In a comprehensive survey published in the Journal of Glaciology, H. Jay Zwally, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Maryland, and a team of NASA scientists confirmed that climate warming was affecting Earth’s largest storehouse of ice and snow. Results of studies measuring the ice sheets covering Greenland and Antarctica indicated that Greenland’s ice sheets had experienced a net loss between 1992 and 2002—a reduction equivalent to 20 billion tons (18.14 tonnes or 18,143 kilograms) of water—along with a corresponding rise in sea level. The researchers had used a new satellite map showing the height of Greenland’s ice sheets, based on data that two ESA satellites had captured. They had compared it with NASA’s previous map of the edges of the ice sheets to determine the rate at which the thickness of the ice was diminishing. The survey documented for the first time the extensive thinning of the West Antarctic ice shelves, the increase in snowfall in the interior of Greenland, and the thinning at the edges of the ice shelves. Zwally remarked, “the contribution of ice sheets to recent sea-level rise during the decade studied was much smaller than expected, just 2 percent of the recent increase of nearly 3 millimeters a year.” NASA would continue to monitor the polar ice sheets using data from the Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat), which had launched in 2003.
NASA, “NASA Survey Confirms Climate Warming Impact on Polar Ice Sheets,” news release 06-089, 8 March 2006, http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2006/mar/HQ_06089_polar_ice_sheets_melting.html (accessed 14 September 2009); see also H. Jay Zwally et al., “Mass Changes of the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets and Shelves and Contributions to Sea-level Rise: 1992–2002,” Journal of Glaciology 51, no. 175 (December 2005): 509-527.
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