Polar Ice Sheets Lose 11.3 Trillion Tons

Greenland and Antarctica lost 11.3 trillion metric tons of ice between 1979 and 2023. Researchers merged 42 datasets from 27 satellite missions into a single 50-year record. The loss raised global average sea levels by roughly 3 centimeters, about 1 inch. The ice sheets contribute about one-quarter of recent sea-level rise. Greenland shed about 6,500 billion tons; Antarctica lost roughly 4,780 billion tons. Inès Otosaka said the team wanted a comprehensive five-decade estimate. "It is a huge number," she said. "If you put that into context, it's about enough ice to fill a cube that would be 23 kilometers (14 miles) in height." More than four-fifths of the loss came from faster-flowing glaciers responding to a warming ocean, she said, not surface melt. Losses rose from about 60 billion tons a year in Greenland and 48 billion in Antarctica in the 1980s to 264 and 202 billion in the 2010s. Heavy East Antarctic snowfall and milder Greenland summers slowed the rate from 2020 to 2023. The study was published in Scientific Data on September 16, 2026. Otosaka's team plans region-by-region estimates for Greenland and Antarctica.