Glaciers Contribute One Third to Sea Level Rise

Ninety-nine percent of all of Earth's land ice is locked up in the massive Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. However, over the period 2003 to 2009, the melting of the world's other land ice stored in glaciers contributed just as much to sea level rise as the two ice sheets combined. This is the result of a new study led by Alex Gardner from Clark University (USA), which has been published in the current issue of the journal Science. Glaciologist Georg Kaser from the University of Innsbruck is one of the contributors to this study. "In this international cooperation, we have been able to discern much more precisely than ever before how much these glaciers as a whole are contributing to sea level rise," says Georg Kaser from the Institute for Meteorology and Geophysics of the University of Innsbruck about the study A Reconciled Estimate of Glacier Contributions to Sea Level Rise: 2003 to 2009. "The study confirms that the melting of these smaller ice bodies account for one third of the observed sea level rise while the ice-sheets and thermal expansion of the oceans account for two thirds," says Kaser. "Previous estimates of the recent contribution of glaciers to sea level rise have differed widely." - In the new study 16 researchers from 10 countries compared traditional ground measurements to satellite data from NASA's ICESat (Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite) and GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) missions.