13 thoughts on “New Research: Accurate Arctic Ice Loss Measurement”


  1. Good work by Box and associates. It becomes clearer all the time, but we still have some unknown knowns (or rather not fully understood knowns) like the impact of interacting or reinforcing feedback mechanisms. I read a piece just the other day about this but can’t find it—-here’s something similar.

    https://www.pnas.org/content/115/33/8252


  2. Worthwhile mentioning the video description:

    ideo abstract for study: Box, J.E., W.T. Colgan, B. Wouters, D.O. Burgess, S. O’Neel, L.I. Thomson, S.H. Mernild 2018. Global sea-level contribution from Arctic land ice: 1971–2017, Environmental Research Letters, ERL-105795, https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aaf2ed

    glacier mass balance (and sea level contribution) data are downloadable from https://tinyurl.com/Box-Arctic-MB

    Key messages

    The loss rate of Arctic land ice has increased threefold since 1986, from nearly 5000 tons of water per second during the “recent past” (1986–2005) to 14,000 tons per second in the present day (2005–2015).
    If we divided the recent ice loss among the world’s nearly 8 billion people, each person would get 160 litres (or 40 gallons) of water, each and every day of the year.
    The present loss rate of Arctic ice is equivalent with 200 times the flow of the Thames river or nearly that of the Mississippi river.
    We show that the sea-level contribution from Arctic land ice is one third of the global amount since 1992, making the Arctic the largest regional source of sea-level rise.
    Greenland alone, the largest source, represents half (46%) of the Arctic ice loss contribution to sea-level rise.


  3. I look forward to reading the ERL paper.

    Also recommend Dangendorf, et al, in PNAS (early edition), 2017, “Reassessment of 20th century global mean sea
    level rise
    “. Upshot there is that earlier 20th century SLR trends had large uncertainties and, if suitably constrained, these turn out to be lower than the means previously estimated. The implication is that more recent SLR trends, having higher confidence due to measurement and process methods, are that much higher, implying a greater acceleration in SLR trend.


    1. @Opie2017,

      Oh really. How much is it cooling? How do you know it’s effective? To know that you need to know how much it is warmed. It is helpful to know why it has warmed. Do you know that? It’s important to know because if you don’t it could warm up much more than ice cooling it?

      And, besides, how much does ice cool anyway? How much ice is being contributed? Does it cool more or less than evaporation does? And if water vapor condenses, how much heat is liberated? It seems since you sense these things intuitively, via your “gut”, you should know the answers to all these things.

      Please, inform us, and save us the work of study in libraries, books, and in the field, since you obviously have a palantir in your belly that can save us a lot of work.

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