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Ice Lost Today
+2.3M per minute · since 00:00 UTC
Estimated, not measured
Ice mass and sea ice are different stories. This is grounded ice — Greenland and Antarctica — and losing it raises sea level. Sea ice is already floating, so when it melts the sea does not rise; it just stops reflecting sunlight.
Estimated tonnes of land ice lost since midnight UTC from the great ice sheets and the world's glaciers.
Nobody counts this as it happens. EarthNow takes a published figure for the whole day, divides it by the 86,400 seconds in a day, and multiplies by the seconds elapsed since midnight UTC. So the value climbs smoothly and is the right order of magnitude — but the smoothness is arithmetic, not observation. Nothing happening in the world is being watched in real time.
value = daily total ÷ 86,400 × seconds since 00:00 UTC
A consequence worth knowing: the counter resets at midnight UTC, not at your midnight. And because every signal advances at a constant rate, this page cannot tell you whether today is unusual. For that you need a measurement.
28 trillion tonnes of ice lost between 1994 and 2017 — ~1.2 trillion tonnes a year.
The figure is theirs; the running total is ours. Cite them for the number, and EarthNow for what it looks like as it accumulates.
NOAA publishes a real measurement related to this signal: Arctic sea ice extent. It is an instrument reading with a date attached, not an estimate — and it is the number to cite.
The ocean area with at least 15% ice cover, measured by satellite microwave sensors that see through cloud and polar night. It reaches its yearly minimum each September.
See the measured reading →