08/09/2020 (Agence Europe) – The rate at which the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are melting corresponds to the worst-case scenarios of sea-level rise established by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the European Space Agency (ESA) warned on Tuesday 8 September. Taking up the results of a study by an international team of scientists from the University of Leeds and the Danish Meteorological Institute, published a few days earlier in the journal Nature Climate Change, ESA points out that Greenland and Antarctica together lost 6,400 billion tonnes of ice between 1992 and 2017, raising global sea levels by 1.78 centimetres. If these rates continue, the melting of the ice caps is expected to raise sea levels by a further 17 centimetres, exposing an additional 16 million people to annual coastal flooding by the end of the century. (DG)