Measurements of Time-Variable Gravity Show Mass Loss in Antarctica

By Isabella Velicogna, John M. Wahr. Science, 2006

603 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Using measurements of time-variable gravity from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellites, we determined mass variations of the Antarctic ice sheet during 2002–2005. We found that the mass of the ice sheet decreased significantly, at a rate of 152 ± 80 cubic kilometers of ice per year, which is equivalent to 0.4 ± 0.2 millimeters of global sea-level rise per year. Most of this mass loss came from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Oceanography, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/260b65e4c7a7725ac23ed17f0e80b5840ed596bb

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Citations in the corpus

Time‐variable gravity observations of ice sheet mass balance: Precision and limitations of the GRACE satellite data (2013, background): “Removing the GIA signal has a significant impact for Antarctica, where it is a major part of the GRACE signal [Velicogna and Wahr, 2006a].”
Interannual variations of the mass balance of the Antarctica and Greenland ice sheets from GRACE (2006, methodology): “4a,b,c is the contamination effect (or leakage) of gravity signals due to reservoirs other than the ice sheets (atmosphere, ocean, terrestrial water reservoirs) (e.g., Velicogna and Wahr, 2005, 2006).”
The design of an optimal filter for monthly GRACE gravity models (2008, methodology): “Note that rescaling as suggested by Velicogna & Wahr (2006) can be applied no matter what filter is being used.”
Approximate decorrelation and non-isotropic smoothing of time-variable GRACE-type gravity field models (2007, background): “Velicogna and Wahr (2006) rescaled their estimates for mass loss in Antarctica by a factor of 1/0.”
The impact of sea level rise on developing countries: a comparative analysis (2007, methodology): “Velicogna and Wahr (2006) have determined mass variations of the entire Antarctic ice sheet during 2002-2005.3 Their results indicate that the mass of the ice sheet decreased”
Detection of Continental Hydrology and Glaciology Signals from GRACE: A Review (2008, methodology): “GIA phenomena are not-well modelled, especially over the whole of Antarctica, where available long-term observational constraints remain rare.”
Deceleration in the Earth's oblateness (2013, background): “[23] Antarctica and Greenland, which hold enormous reserves of fresh water, have undergone a significant ice mass loss during the last decade [Velicogna and Wahr, 2005, 2006], and recent results indicate a likely acceleration of that mass loss [Velicogna, 2009; Chen et al., 2009; Jacob et al.,…”
Estimating geocenter variations from a combination of GRACE and ocean model output (2008, background): “... and ice on land and of water in the oceans, is proving to be a particularly useful application of GRACE, e.g., to estimate terrestrial water storage variations from the scale of large river basins [Crowley et al., 2006; Seo et al., 2006] to the continents [Schmidt et al., 2006; Tapley et al., 20”
Effect of GIA models with 3D composite mantle viscosity on GRACE mass balance estimates for Antarctica (2015, methodology): “Uplift rates for the case when W12a is combined with the HF10D earth model are plotted together with the uplift rates from Whitehouse et al. (2012b) in Fig.”