"Alaska’s Glaciers Are Now Losing 75 Billion Tons of Ice Every Year"

"In a new study, scientists with the University of Alaska at Fairbanks and several other institutions report a staggering finding: Glaciers of the United States’ largest — and only Arctic — state, Alaska, have lost 75 gigatons (a gigaton is a billion metric tons) of ice per year from 1994 through 2013.

For comparison, that’s roughly half of a recent estimate for ice loss for all of Antarctica (159 billion metric tons). It takes 360 gigatons of ice to lead to one millimeter of sea level rise, which implies that the Alaska region alone may have contributed several millimeters in the past few decades.

'Despite Greenland’s ice covered area being 20 times greater than that of Alaska, losses in Alaska were fully one third of the total loss from the ice sheet during 2005-2010,' wrote the authors, led by Chris Larsen of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks’s Geophysical Institute. The study was published in Geophysical Research Letters."

Chris Mooney reports for the Washington Post June 17, 2015.