The great ice meldown vizualized

Nearly 70% of the Earth's freshwater is locked up in glaciers and ice caps, ground ice, and permafrost. However, this ice is melting at an unprecedented rate.

A new scientific survey based on satellite observations and numerical models reveals that 28 trillion tonnes of the Earth's ice have melted away in just 24 years. About 58% of this global ice loss happened in the Northern Hemisphere.

Visualcapitalist made attractive infographics visualizing Earth's Global Ice Loss Between 1994-2017.

The rate of ice loss has increased from 0.8 trillion tonnes to 1.2 trillion tonnes per year (risen 57% since the 1990s).

Such volumes of melting ice are hard to imagine. For comparison, 1 billion tonnes of water is equivalent to 400 thousand Olympic swimming pools.

It's then a bit simpler to perceive why, when multiplied tens of thousands of times, this much-melted ice has occurred in global sea levels, increasing by 34.6 millimeters on average.

Ice Loss Change between 1994-2017 (trillion tonnes)

Floating Arctic sea ice - 7.6
Grounded Antarctic ice shelves - 6.5
Grounded Mountain glaciers - 6.1
Grounded Greenland ice sheet - 3.8
Grounded Antarctic ice sheet - 2.5
Floating Southern Ocean sea ice - 0.9

If all the ice on planet Earth melts, the world's oceans' level will rise by 70 meters.

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