Scientists are going to need another ten years of satellite observations before they can determine whether or not the rate at which ice sheets are melting is a result of global warming, a new study said.
Published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience, it is not yet clear if the melting of ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland is due to global warming or if it is simply a fluctuation in the climate. Either way, experts said in the report they will need another decade to determine.
Data was gathered by observations made with the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite from 2003-2012.
"The ice sheets are losing substantial amounts of ice - about 300 billion tons each year - and the rate at which these losses occurs is increasing," Study lead author Dr. Bert Wouter, of the University of Colorado said. "Compared to the first few years of the GRACE mission, the ice sheets' contribution to sea-level rise has almost doubled in recent years."
GRACE measured the ice sheet's mass distribution and movements toward the ocean by calculating changes in the gravity field above. The study analyzed that data against 50 years of mass changes in the ice sheets.
"We find that the record length of space-borne gravity observations is too short at present to meaningfully separate long-term accelerations from short-term ice sheet variability," the study stated.
Climate scientists are still hesitant to credit the loss of mass in the ice sheets to global warming. The researches said they still need another ten years of satellite data to be able to predict what the glaciers and the ocean level will look like at the end of the century.
"The science community has always been aware that it may not be appropriate to extrapolate the acceleration of ice mass loss observed in the satellite-based observations," said Professor Tim Naish, Director of the Antarctic Research Center at New Zealand's Victoria University of Wellington.
"This is why the community and the IPCC do not base their assessment of future ice sheet contribution to sea-level rise on the satellite data alone."
