The research, conducted by a team led by the University of Leeds and published in the journal The Cryosphere, revealed that a total of twenty-eight trillion metric tons of ice was lost between 1994 and 2017. In the 1990s, the planet’s ice was melting at a rate of about seven hundred sixty billion tons per year—but in the 2010s, that figure surged 60 percent to an average of 1.2 trillion tons each year. “The ice sheets are now following the worst-case climate warming scenarios set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” lead author Thomas Slater, a research fellow at the University of Leeds’ Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling, said in a statement.