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Earth Science

390 Billion Tons of Snow and Ice Melt Each Year As Globe Warms, Study Suggests (usatoday.com) 172

Posted by BeauHD 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.
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390 Billion Tons of Snow and Ice Melt Each Year As Globe Warms, Study Suggests More

390 Billion Tons of Snow and Ice Melt Each Year As Globe Warms, Study Suggests

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  • Oh No! What Should I do? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Oh my. This is horrible. More water. Less ice! I'm afraid!

  • Out of? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by SlaveToTheGrind ( 546262 )

    Some representative estimates of just the two ice sheets:
    - 26,500,000 gigatons [wikipedia.org] in Antarctica
    - 2,900,000 gigatons [polarportal.dk] 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.

    • I guess nothing sounds impressive if you compare it to something else that's much bigger.

      • I guess nothing sounds impressive if you compare it to something else that's much bigger.

        As you know, I'm not comparing it to "something else" -- I'm comparing it to the entirety of exactly the same substance that TFA implies is being lost at a catastrophic rate by throwing around big-sounding numbers in a vacuum.

        That would be like me saying, "around 200 billion cells in your body are dying EACH DAY [healthline.com] -- you'd best get your affairs in order."

        Context matters.

        • I'm comparing it to the entirety of exactly the same substance that TFA implies is being lost at a catastrophic rate

          Right, so the article makes the same error.

    • Is that a comp-sci gigaton (1024 megatons) or an SI gigaton (1000 megatons)? I really wish you had used standard abbreviations, e.g. GiT or GT. =p

    • It should also be noted that if 390Gigatons of ice/snow are melting every year, that translates to an approximate sealevel rise of...

      0.755 mm/year. So, rather less than one meter of sealevel rise by 3000AD....

    • Clearly, you would not be hurt if a chunk that massed 0.0013% of the ice sheets fell on your foot.

  • Of course it does. If no polar ice and snow melted we would be in the middle of a god damn ice age not to mention a global drought.
    What is important is the balance between melting and precipitation. What is the net melt?

  • We better put the earth on a diet!

    I wonder how the weight redistribution will effect the earth's spin... We'll end up on our side like Neptune, all the water will go the bottom. Then the weather will get real exciting!

  • Why does this take a study? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bradley13 ( 1118935 ) on Tuesday April 09, 2019 @08:51AM (#58409416) Homepage

    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...

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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.

    • The rest must be melt water from glaciers and snow on land.

      It's not quite that straightforward since the polar ice is made up of fresh water, and the ocean is salt water. That means the melting ice with change the density of the oceans making the math more complicated.

  • % please! (Score:3)

    by hcs_$reboot ( 1536101 ) on Tuesday April 09, 2019 @09:05AM (#58409496)
    300 trillions of water molecules are thrown in the air when I sneeze. "390 billion tons of ice and snow", what's that compared to the oceans weight? What's that compared to 50 years ago? Big numbers are impressive, but need to be relative, to be credible.

    • A better number to relate to is the annual sea level rise, partially caused by melting land ice, which is now about 3.3 millimeters/year (about 1/8")

      • OP was asking for context (which I've provided here [slashdot.org], btw). Simply providing a completely different out-of-context measure doesn't move the ball forward.

        • I know, but converting the number to a percentage of some other hard-to-imagine quantity (like total sea/ice volume) isn't very useful, even though OP was asking for it. For instance, if the oceans were twice as deep, the relative number would halve, despite the depth of the oceans being totally irrelevant for every day understanding.

          Relating it to a sea level rise gets you a quantity that's relevant, and easy to visualize.

  • Study Suggests..... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Zorro ( 15797 )

    AKA BS Headline by a lazy reporter.

  • First, data useless without comparison data.

    Second, even the original study itself is almost ridiculously vague - https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com] : "...glaciers contributed 27 ± 22 millimetres to global mean sea-level rise from 1961 to 2016..." 27 plus/minus 22? LOL the errorbar is nearly the size of the datum. What does that say about the data?

    Third, I'd say it's at least somewhat relevant to check historical data (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Past_sea_level#/media/File:Phanerozoic_Sea_L

    • Essentially, humanity evolved at low tide, now we're bitching that the tide's coming in and is giong to knock over our sandcastles.

      Just because there used to be a shallow sea where my house was, means that I shouldn't complain if it floods ?

      • more flooding where I grew up because more and more suburbs added to an overcapacity sewage / floodwater system.... means nothing

  • It appears that up in the arctic, that Alaska is losing the most, followed by western Canada, and then it just keep flowing around, with eastern Russia losing the least. So, where is Alaska getting all that warming from? It can not be the lower 48 since in the upper northern hemisphere, it will move north east. When will the far left acknowledge where the large CO2 amounts are coming from and change them.

    • firstly [skepticalscience.com]

      Individual carbon dioxide molecules have a short life time of around 5 years in the atmosphere. However, when they leave the atmosphere, they're simply swapping places with carbon dioxide in the ocean. The final amount of extra CO2 that remains in the atmosphere stays there on a time scale of centuries.

      You're a bit thick so again, CO2 remains in the atmosphere a long time [theguardian.com]

      This means that once in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide can continue to affect climate for thousands of years.

      So it isn't just last years CO2 emissions that are warming Canada.

      This is a much more appropriate timescale [ourworldindata.org]

      If we extend our timeline back to 1750 and total up how much CO2 each country has emitted to date, we calculate each nation’s ‘cumulative emissions’.

      If we fast-forward to the accumulated totals we see today, the US and Europe dominate in terms of cumulative emissions. China’s rapid growth in emissions over the last few decades now makes it the world’s second largest cumulative emitter, although it still comes in at less than 50% of the US total.

      So in fact America is responsible for over twice as much CO2 as China.
      But wait it gets better.

      The key drawback of measuring the total national emissions is that it takes no account of the nation's population size. China is currently the world’s largest emitter, but since it also has the largest population, all being equal we would expect this to be the case. To make a fair comparison of contributions, we have to therefore compare emissions in terms of CO2 emitted per person.

      Let's just say, per person American's have been, and still are extremely bad.
      Let's look here starting in 1950 to match the timescale in the summary and report. [ourworldindata.org] You can slide it yourself to see that the US is bright red on the

  • Where does 390Gt number come from? The study being reported on says 335 ± 144 Gt / year.

  • What is the intended purpose of an article like this?

    390 BILLION!!!! TONS!!!!! of snow is mellllllllllllting!

    Who the fuck cares? Tell me how much MORE or LESS snow is melting in any given year. Of course the total number is going to be staggeringly huge, this is a fucking PLANET, not your back yard.

    But the staggeringly huge number is being used for a purpose. It would appear to be designed to get us hysterical... but what is the end game?

    Many people react negatively to hysteria inducing claims but many igno

    • Blame the journalists not the scientists, they also got the figure wrong because the felt the need to convert to US customary units.

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