If global emissions continue at their current rate, Earth’s ice sheets are vulnerable to massive ice loss that could substantially raise sea levels.įor example, the Antarctic Ice Sheet covers almost 14 million square kilometers (5.4 million square miles), roughly the area of the contiguous United States and Mexico combined. Ice sheets are an important resource because they contribute vital ecosystem services, such as keeping fresh water frozen as ice-acting as global water towers. Together, the Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets contain more than 99 percent of the land ice and over 68 percent of the fresh water on Earth. Ice sheets are constantly in motion, spreading out under their own weight in broad domes. Now, Earth has just two ice sheets: one covers most of Greenland, the largest island in the world, and the other spans across the Antarctic continent. Ice sheets once covered much of the Northern Hemisphere during a series of Pleistocene Ice Ages. Credit: Christopher Michel/FlickrĪn ice sheet is a mass of glacial land ice extending more than 50,000 square kilometers (20,000 square miles). Mount Vinson lies within the Sentinel Range of the Ellsworth Mountains, overlooking the Ronne Ice Shelf near the base of the Antarctic Peninsula. The highest mountain in Antarctica, Mount Vinson, looms behind the base camp in the foreground. Exchange for Observations and Local Knowledge of the Arctic (ELOKA).NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center (NSIDC DAAC).Greenland Today & Antarctic Ice Sheet Today.A part of CIRES at the University of Colorado Boulder
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