• DOI:10.1038/s41586-018-0179-y
• Corpus ID: 49188002

Mass balance of the Antarctic Ice Sheet from 1992 to 2017

@article{Shepherd2018MassBO,
  title={Mass balance of the Antarctic Ice Sheet from 1992 to 2017},
  author={Andrew Shepherd and Erik R. Ivins and E. Rignot and Ben E. Smith and Michiel van den Broeke and Isabella Velicogna and Pippa L. Whitehouse and Kate H. Briggs and Ian R. Joughin and Gerhard Krinner and Sophie M. J. Nowicki and Tony Payne and Theodore A. Scambos and Nicole Schlegel and A Geruo and C{\'e}cile Agosta and Andreas P. Ahlstr{\o}m and G. S. Babonis and Valentina R. Barletta and Alejandro Blazquez and Jennifer A. Bonin and Be{\'a}ta M. Csath{\'o} and Richard I. Cullather and Denis Felikson and Xavier Fettweis and Ren{\'e} Forsberg and Hubert Gallee and Alex S. Gardner and Lin Gilbert and Andreas Groh and Brian C. Gunter and Edward Hanna and Christoph Harig and Veit Helm and Alexander Horvath and Martin Horwath and Shfaqat Abbas Khan and Kristian Kjellerup Kjeldsen and Hannes Konrad and Peter L. Langen and Benoit S. Lecavalier and Bryant D. Loomis and Scott B. Luthcke and Malcolm McMillan and Daniele Melini and Sebastian H. Mernild and Yara Mohajerani and Philip Moore and J{\'e}r{\'e}mie Mouginot and Gorka Moyano and Alan Muir and Thomas Nagler and Grace A. Nield and Johan Nilsson and Brice P. Y. Noel and In{\`e}s N. Otosaka and Mark E. Pattle and William Richard Peltier and N Pie and Roelof Rietbroek and Helmut Rott and Louise Sandberg-S{\o}rensen and Ingo Sasgen and Himanshu Save and Bernd Scheuchl and Ernst J. O. Schrama and Ludwig Schr{\"o}der and Ki‐Weon Seo and Sebastian Bjerregaard Simonsen and Thomas Slater and Giorgio Spada and Tyler Clark Sutterley and Matthieu Jean Talpe and Lev Tarasov and Willem Jan van de Berg and W. Wal and Melchior van Wessem and Bramha Dutt Vishwakarma and David N. Wiese and Bert Wouters},
  journal={Nature},
  year={2018},
  volume={558},
  pages={219 - 222}
}

• A. Shepherd, E. Ivins, +77 authors B. Wouters
• Published 1 June 2018
• Environmental Science
• Nature

The Antarctic Ice Sheet is an important indicator of climate change and driver of sea-level rise. Here we combine satellite observations of its changing volume, flow and gravitational attraction with modelling of its surface mass balance to show that it lost 2,720 ± 1,390 billion tonnes of ice between 1992 and 2017, which corresponds to an increase in mean sea level of 7.6 ± 3.9 millimetres (errors are one standard deviation). Over this period, ocean-driven melting has caused rates of ice loss from West Antarctica to increase from 53 ± 29 billion to 159 ± 26 billion tonnes per year; ice-shelf collapse has increased the rate of ice loss from the Antarctic Peninsula from 7 ± 13 billion to 33 ± 16 billion tonnes per year. We find large variations in and among model estimates of surface mass balance and glacial isostatic adjustment for East Antarctica, with its average rate of mass gain over the period 1992–2017 (5 ± 46 billion tonnes per year) being the least certain.