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In the Arctic, the main contribution to sea level rise is from the Greenland ice sheet. Sea ice is melting at an alarming rate, but because the sea ice already sits in the oceans, this does not contribute to sea level rise. Mountain glaciers are also trickling into the oceans quickly, but their mass is much less than that of Greenland, so we won't use them in this estimate - even though the worldwide melt rate of mountain glaciers is higher than that of Greenland. All the same, we'll approximate that all of the sea level rise in the Arctic is coming from Greenland.

Greenland is losing about 250 million tons of ice each year (267 +/- 38 Gton/yr to be exact), and has a total ice mass of 2.3 x 10^15 tons. Thus, the fraction of ice Greenland is losing each year is 1 x 10^(-7), or 100 billionths of its total mass. Note that this number is the *net* loss - it includes both the losses from calving icebergs and surface melt, and the gains from snowfall on the interior.

Antarctica is less clear because we have fewer measurements about the snowfall accumulation on the interior. Many different projections of the mass balance have come up with different values - the study I will use found that the mass balance is -5 to +85 million tons of ice per year. The total mass of Antarctica is 2.2 x 10^16 tons, so Antarctica is doing something in the range of losing 0.2 billionths of its mass to gaining 4 billionths of its mass each year. Again, these estimates are Antarctica's net mass balance - losses from calving and gains from snowfall.

We have observed about 3-4 millimeters per year of sea level rise, averaged over the entire twentieth century. Most of the observed sea level rise to date is actually due to thermal expansion of sea water - hotter water takes up more space. The colder water coming in from the melting ice sheets is insignificant compared to the huge volumes of warmer ocean water that already exist.

See the links below for the studies referred to.

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Q: What percentage of ice in the Arctic and Antarctica is melting and making the seas raise?
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