Review article: Earth's ice imbalance

Slater, Thomas; Lawrence, Isobel R.; Otosaka, Inès N.; Shepherd, Andrew; Gourmelen, Noel; Jakob, Livia; Tepes, Paul; Gilbert, Lin; Nienow, Peter

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-15-233-2021

Articles | Volume 15, issue 1

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-15-233-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-15-233-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 15, issue 1

Review article

| Highlight paper

|

25 Jan 2021

Review article | Highlight paper |

| 25 Jan 2021

Review article: Earth's ice imbalance

Thomas Slater, Isobel R. Lawrence, Inès N. Otosaka, Andrew Shepherd, Noel Gourmelen, Livia Jakob, Paul Tepes, Lin Gilbert, and Peter Nienow

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Final revised paper (published on 25 Jan 2021)
Preprint (discussion started on 14 Aug 2020)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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- Supplement

SC1: 'Earth's ice imbalance', Roger Walker, 23 Aug 2020
- AC2: 'Response to short comment', Thomas Slater, 15 Nov 2020
RC1: 'Review of ‘Earth’s ice imbalance’ by Slater et al.,', Anonymous Referee #1, 08 Oct 2020
- AC1: 'Response to reviewers', Thomas Slater, 15 Nov 2020
RC2: 'Review of "Review Article: Earth's ice imbalance"', Anonymous Referee #2, 27 Oct 2020
- AC1: 'Response to reviewers', Thomas Slater, 15 Nov 2020

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (18 Nov 2020) by Xavier Fettweis

AR by Thomas Slater on behalf of the Authors (18 Nov 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (18 Nov 2020) by Xavier Fettweis

AR by Thomas Slater on behalf of the Authors (18 Nov 2020)

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The requested paper has a corresponding corrigendum published. Please read the corrigendum first before downloading the article.

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Short summary

Satellite observations are the best method for tracking ice loss, because the cryosphere is vast and remote. Using these, and some numerical models, we show that Earth has lost 28 trillion tonnes (Tt) of ice since 1994 from Arctic sea ice (7.6 Tt), ice shelves (6.5 Tt), mountain glaciers (6.1 Tt), the Greenland (3.8 Tt) and Antarctic ice sheets (2.5 Tt), and Antarctic sea ice (0.9 Tt). It has taken just 3.2 % of the excess energy Earth has absorbed due to climate warming to cause this ice loss.