Visualizing the Quantities of Climate Change

Satellite data show that Greenland and Antarctica are losing mass at a rate of 283 gigatonnes per year and 145 gigatonnes per year, respectively. So how big is just one gigatonne?

This unit of mass is equivalent to one billion metric tons, 2.2 trillion pounds, or 10,000 fully-loaded U.S. aircraft carriers.

Central Park is 4 kilometers long and 0.8 kilometers wide. A gigatonne of ice placed here would extend 341 meters (1,119 feet) high.

Central Park dimensions (from OpenStreetMap):

This unit of mass is equivalent to one billion metric tons, 2.2 trillion pounds, or 10,000 fully-loaded U.S. aircraft carriers.

The National Mall extends 2 kilometers between the Washington Monument and the U.S. Capitol, and is 200 meters wide. A gigatonne of ice placed here would extend 2728 meters (8,948 feet) high.

National Mall dimensions (from OpenStreetMap):

This is the amount of ice lost from the polar ice caps that NASA’s original GRACE mission observed from 2002 to 2017.

During the 15-year lifetime of the original GRACE mission (2002-2017), 5,641 gigatonnes of ice of were lost in Greenland and Antarctica. Ninety-nine percent of the world’s freshwater ice is located in these ice sheets.

This is enough to cover Texas in a sheet of ice 26 feet high.

This is our best estimate of how much Greenland and Antarctic ice has melted into the ocean since the start of the 20th century.

Global sea level has risen by about 8 inches since 1901. This rise is due to a combination of melting ice and water expanding due to increased temperatures. While we don’t have precise measurements, scientific models indicate that melting ice has caused about two-thirds of sea level rise to date.

We estimate that 49,000 gigatonnes of ice have melted over that time frame—enough ice to cover the entire contiguous U.S. in an ice sheet 22 feet high (about 7 meters), or coat the entire Moon's surface in a 5-foot-high ice sheet.