Loading
+2.3M per minute · since 00:00 UTC
This is a live, continuously changing estimate. It isn't printed here because a figure on paper would be wrong the moment you read it — see the current value at https://earthnow.app/signal/ice-lost-today.
Estimated, not measured
Across the survey behind this figure, just over half of the ice lost was already floating — sea ice and ice shelves — and floating ice adds almost nothing to sea level when it melts. The speed-up has come mostly from ice on land: in the survey's latest decade most of the loss was grounded ice, in mountain glaciers and the two great ice sheets, and that is the part that lifts the sea.
Estimated tonnes of ice lost since midnight UTC, counted the way the survey behind the figure counts it: all of Earth's ice, floating and grounded. That is Arctic sea ice, the Antarctic ice shelves and the sea ice around Antarctica alongside mountain glaciers and the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. Across the survey period Arctic sea ice was the largest single part; in its latest decade it was one of the smallest.
The measured reading paired with this figure is Arctic sea ice extent — an area, not a mass. It follows what was the largest single part of this total over the survey period, not the whole of it, and none of the grounded ice that raises sea level.
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 the figure 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. It measures a related quantity, not this counter's own: cite it for what it measures, and never as a measured value of the figure above.
The loss of Arctic sea ice is one part of what this counter counts, and the reading is how much of that ice there is. It gives an extent, an area, rather than a mass, so ice that thins without shrinking does not show in it.
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.
—M km²
Citation