In 2021, global ice loss has increased very rapidly and it just keeps getting worse. The climate change started to get worse two decades ago and again has been increasing and getting worse. When it does continue to get worse, the sea levels will rise and it sounds good but it will harm the arctic animals but give us more water.

According to The Washington Post, “From the thin ice shield covering most of the Arctic Ocean to the mile-thick mantle of the polar ice sheets, ice losses have soared from about 760 billion tons per year in the 1990s to more than 1.2 trillion tons per year in the 2010s.” This means that it is an increase of more than 60 percent and that is equal to 28 trillion tons of melted ice in total. Roughly three percent of all the extra energy trapped within Earth’s system by climate change has gone towards turning ice into water. 

“That’s like more than 10,000 ‘Back to the Future’ lightning strikes per second of energy melting ice around-the-clock since 1994,” said William Colgan, an ice-sheet expert at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland. “That is just a bonkers amount of energy.”

However, not all the ice on the planet turns into rising seas. For an example, 7.6 trillion tons, which is the largest amount, comes from the melting of the floating ice cover of the Arctic Ocean, which does not raise seas at all.

“It is no surprise that the ice on our planet is melting,” said Robin Bell, an expert on the polar ice sheets at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “We have turned up the temperature, and just like you can watch an ice cube in your glass melt on a hot summer day, our actions are melting our planet’s ice.”

“It’s like cutting the feet off the glacier rather than melting the whole body,” said Eric Rignot, a study co-author and a glacier researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of California at Irvine. “You melt the feet and the body falls down, as opposed to melting the whole body.”

Eric Rignot is basically comparing the ice melting to a human body, saying that it is only like cutting off the feet of the human body and still having the rest but for that it is melting.

Overall, there is not anything we can do to stop the ice from melting, but what we can do is save the arctic animals and move them to a cold place where they can live for the rest of their lives.