The total volume of water that has melted from all of the world's polar ice sheets, ice caps and mountain glaciers over the past decade would fill Britain's largest lake, Windermere, more than 13,000 times, according to one of the most comprehensive studies of the Earth's frozen "cryosphere".
Using satellites that have monitored the disappearing ice over the entire surface of the globe, scientists estimated that some 4168 cubic km of ice disappeared between 2003 and 2010 - enough to cover the United States in 0.5m of water.
The survey found that the melting of the cryosphere has been responsible for raising sea levels by about 1.27cm over the same period, equivalent to a rise of about 1.5mm a year. This was on top of sea-level increases due to the thermal expansion of seawater caused by rising ocean temperatures.
Data gathered by the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, a joint satellite project run by Nasa and the German Government, also found that the amount of ice melting from the mountain glaciers and ice caps that were not in Greenland or Antarctica was actually significantly smaller than previous estimates had suggested.
Instead of contributing nearly 1mm of sea level rise per year as previously suggested, some of the Earth's glaciers and ice caps, especially in the Himalayas and Asia, were melting slower than expected, contributing about 0.4mm of sea level rise per year - less than half the amount predicted.
