Yesterday, I estimated how many Empire State Buildings fit into the volume of sea ice lost by the Arctic each decade and year (3 million and 3 hundred thousand, respectively).
Today, I want to attempt that same calculation with the entire world.
Now, I am going to take a massive shortcut by using IPCC AR4 sea level rise (SLR) contribution data, and a simple conversion formula (1mm of global SLR = ~360 Gt ice, and 0.92 tonnes of ice ≡ 1 m³ of ice).
| Rate of SLR (mm per year) | ||
| Source of sea level rise | 1993–2003 | |
| Glaciers and ice caps | 0.77 ± 0.22 | |
| Greenland Ice Sheet | 0.21 ± 0.07 | |
| Antarctic Ice Sheet | 0.21 ± 0.35 | |
Adding those together, and using the conversion formula above, we get 1.19mm/yr and 11.9mm/decade SLR from those three sources, or 4,656,521,739,130 m^3 global land ice volume lost every ten years. Divide that by the volume of the Empire State Building, and, for the sake of perspective once again, we have an additional 4,656,522 famous skyscrapers to tack onto yesterday's figure. That's the volume of approximately 7.6 million Empire State Buildings lost in ice worldwide each decade, and seven hundred and sixty thousand lost each year. Also, that's the volume of about 1.5-2 Mt. Everests lost each decade by my admittedly wanting estimation of the space taken up by the notorious peak.
