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New AI estimates that global glaciers contain about 150,000 cubic kilometers of ice, and melting could raise sea levels by 32.3 centimeters
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Source: ithome.com
IT House News on August 8, technology media phys published a blog post today (August 8), reporting that scientists built the AI model IceBoost v2.0 and estimated that global glaciers contain about 150,000 cubic kilometers of ice. If all melted, excluding Antarctica and Greenland, it would raise the global average sea level by 32.3 centimeters. The project was led by the University of Venice and collaborated with the Institute of Polar Sciences of the Italian National Research Council to train and build a model called IceBoost v2.0 to systematically estimate the amount of ice in global glaciers. The model, developed by Niccolò Maffezzoli, a physicist and researcher at the University of Venice and affiliated with CNR-ISP, was trained with more than 7 million ice thickness measurements from glaciers around the world. It was then combined with 26 physical and geometric variables such as terrain slope, curvature, ice flow speed and temperature to reconstruct ice thickness point by point to estimate the volume of each glacier. This glacier catalog covers the latest global glacier distribution, excluding Antarctic and polar ice caps. The results show that global glaciers contain about 150,000 cubic kilometers of ice, which if all melted (excluding Antarctica and Greenland), would be equivalent to a rise of 32.3 centimeters in global average sea level. The research team stated that this total amount is basically consistent with existing global estimates, but IceBoost v2.0's depiction of the spatial distribution of glaciers is closer to the real situation, and the match with field observations has been improved by up to 40%. This research has implications for both future climate modeling and freshwater management. GlacierMIP4 researchers will use IceBoost v2.0 as a modern representation for next-generation glacier simulations and underpin IPCC assessments of glacier evolution. Glaciers provide water for rivers, ecosystems, agriculture and local communities, affecting about 1.9 billion people worldwide, the paper's authors said. More accurate estimates of ice thickness and volume could help improve predictions of future freshwater supplies, especially in parts of South America that are increasingly arid and desertified. IT of