Ice loss to the sea currently accounts for virtually all of the sea-level rise that is not attributable to ocean warming, and about 60% of the ice loss is from glaciers and ice caps rather than from the two ice sheets. The contribution of these smaller glaciers has accelerated over the past decade, in part due to marked thinning and retreat of marine-terminating glaciers associated with a dynamic instability that is generally not considered in mass-balance and climate modeling. This acceleration of glacier melt may cause 0.1 to 0.25 meter of additional sea-level rise by 2100.

The sum of winter accumulation and summer losses of mass from glaciers and ice sheets (net surface mass balance) varies with changing climate. In the Arctic, glaciers and ice caps, excluding the Greenland Ice Sheet, cover about 275,000 km²of both the widely glacierized archipelagos of the Canadian, Norwegian, and Russian High Arctic and the area north of about 60°N in Alaska, Iceland, and Scandinavia. Since the 1940s, surface mass balance time-series of varying length have been acquired from more than 40 Arctic ice caps and glaciers. Most Arctic glaciers have experienced predominantly negative net surface mass balance over the past few decades. There is no uniform recent trend in mass balance for the entire Arctic, although some regional trends occur. Examples are the increasingly negative mass balances for northern Alaska, due to higher summer temperatures, and increasingly positive mass balances for maritime Scandinavia and Iceland, due to increased winter precipitation. The negative mass balance of most Arctic glaciers may be a response to a step-like warming in the early twentieth century at the termination of the cold Little Ice Age. Arctic ice masses outside Greenland are at present contributing about 0.13 mm yr⁻¹to global sea-level rise.

In the Northern Hemisphere, ~1500 glaciers, accounting for 28% of glacierized area outside the Greenland Ice Sheet, terminate in the ocean. Glacier mass loss at their ice-ocean interface, known as frontal ablation, has not yet been comprehensively quantified. Here, we estimate decadal frontal ablation from measurements of ice discharge and terminus position change from 2000 to 2020. We bias-correct and cross-validate estimates and uncertainties using independent sources. Frontal ablation of marine-terminating glaciers contributed an average of 44.47 ± 6.23 Gt a⁻¹ of ice to the ocean from 2000 to 2010, and 51.98 ± 4.62 Gt a⁻¹ from 2010 to 2020. Ice discharge from 2000 to 2020 was equivalent to 2.10 ± 0.22 mm of sea-level rise and comprised approximately 79% of frontal ablation, with the remainder from terminus retreat. Near-coastal areas most impacted include Austfonna, Svalbard, and central Severnaya Zemlya, the Russian Arctic, and a few Alaskan fjords.

In this paper, we report on an approach to estimate the contribution of Arctic glaciers to sea-level change. In our calculation we assume that a static approach is feasible. We only calculate changes in the surface balance from modelled sensitivities. These sensitivities, summarized in the seasonal sensitivity characteristic, can be used to calculate the change in the surface mass budget for given anomalies of monthly temperature and precipitation. We have based our calculations on a subdivision of all Arctic ice into 13 regions: four sectors of the Greenland ice sheet; the Canadian Arctic >74˚N; the Canadian Arctic 60˚N. As forcing for the calculations, we have used the output from five climate models, for the period 2000–2100. These models were forced by the same greenhouse-gas scenario (IPCC-B2). The calculated contributions to sea-level rise in the year 2100 vary from almost zero to about 6 cm. The differences among the models stem first of all from differences in the precipitation. The largest contribution to sea-level change comes from the Greenland ice sheet. The glaciers in Alaska also make a large contribution, not because of the area they cover, but because they are more sensitive than other glaciers in the Arctic. The climate models do not agree on regional patterns. The runoff from Svalbard glaciers, for instance, increases for two models and decreases for the three other models. We conclude that the uncertainty due to a simple representation of the glaciological processes is probably smaller than the uncertainty induced by the differences in the climate-change scenarios produced by the models.