11.3 trillion tonnes of ice are gone.
That number is difficult to visualize. Yet the latest satellite assessment of Greenland and Antarctica ice loss makes one thing much easier to understand: changes at the poles do not stay at the poles.
Between 1979 and 2023, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets together lost approximately 11,309 billion tonnes — or 11.3 trillion tonnes — of ice. That loss contributed just over 3 centimetres to global sea-level rise.
For climate scientists, this is another major dataset documenting a changing cryosphere.
For engineers, infrastructure owners, sustainability professionals and risk managers, however, it is also something else: a physical climate-risk signal that increasingly needs to enter real-world planning.
What the New Satellite Research Found
The latest findings come from the Ice Sheet Mass Balance Intercomparison Exercise (IMBIE), an international scientific collaboration supported by organizations including the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA.
Researchers combined observations from multiple satellite missions to construct what ESA describes as the longest satellite record of ice-sheet change assembled so far.
The findings are significant.
Greenland and Antarctica lost around 11.3 trillion tonnes of ice between 1979 and 2023. Greenland accounted for roughly 60% of the combined loss. Moreover, the rate of loss accelerated substantially after the 1990s.
Perhaps the most interesting finding is how much of the ice disappeared.
This is not simply a story of warmer air melting ice from the surface.
Around 84% of the total loss was associated with glaciers flowing faster and discharging more ice into the ocean, according to reporting on the research.
That distinction matters because ice sheets interact with both the atmosphere and the ocean. Their behaviour is therefore more complex than the familiar image of ice simply melting under warmer temperatures.
Greenland and Antarctica Ice Loss Is Already Raising Sea Levels
Three centimetres of global sea-level rise may sound small.
From an engineering perspective, however, the baseline matters.
Sea-level rise can increase the height from which storm surges and extreme coastal water levels occur. As the baseline gradually rises, infrastructure designed around historical conditions can face changing exposure over its operating life.
The IPCC has concluded that global mean sea level will continue rising during the 21st century and that sea-level rise is unavoidable for centuries to millennia because of continued ocean warming and ice-sheet loss.
It also reports that extreme sea-level events that historically occurred once per century are projected to occur at least annually at more than half of tide-gauge locations by 2100.
That turns polar science into an infrastructure question.
From Ice Sheets to Engineering Risk
Consider a coastal asset designed today for a service life of 30, 50 or even 100 years.
Its future operating environment may not resemble the conditions recorded when the original design criteria were established.
Ports, seawalls, coastal roads, drainage systems, desalination facilities, power stations, wastewater infrastructure and waterfront developments can all be sensitive to changing sea levels and extreme coastal conditions.
For engineers, the practical question is therefore not:
“How much ice disappeared?”
It is:
“How does a changing climate alter the design conditions, failure probabilities and resilience requirements of the assets we are building today?”
That shift in thinking is important.
Historical environmental data remains essential, but increasingly it may need to be considered alongside forward-looking climate information.
Physical Climate Risk Is Also a Business Risk
The same issue extends beyond engineering design.
Physical climate risk can affect asset values, insurance, maintenance requirements, business continuity, supply chains and capital expenditure.
A coastal facility, for example, may remain operational today while becoming progressively more exposed to flooding or extreme water levels during its lifetime.
Therefore, climate risk should not sit only inside a sustainability report.
It can become relevant to:
- asset planning and design;
- enterprise risk management;
- capital allocation;
- adaptation planning;
- emergency preparedness;
- insurance and financial assessment;
- maintenance strategies; and
- long-term infrastructure investment.
This is where engineering and sustainability increasingly overlap.
ESG teams identify and communicate climate-related risks. Engineers help translate those risks into physical decisions.
The strongest climate-resilience strategies require both.
Why Satellite Monitoring Matters
There is another lesson in this research that deserves attention: measurement matters.
Satellites allow scientists to track enormous ice sheets across decades and reconcile different methods of measuring their changing mass.
ESA notes that Greenland and Antarctica are now responsible for around a quarter of global sea-level rise.
The monitoring principle applies at a smaller scale to organizations as well.
You cannot effectively manage a changing environmental risk if you do not measure it.
That means companies increasingly need reliable climate and environmental data, clear baselines, defined indicators and processes that connect monitoring with decisions.
Data should not exist simply to populate an ESG dashboard.
It should help someone decide what needs to change.
What Should Engineers and Sustainability Teams Do?
The 11.3-trillion-tonne figure should not be interpreted as a prediction that every coastal asset faces the same level of risk.
Climate risk is highly location-specific.
Elevation, local sea-level change, land subsidence, waves, tides, storm surge, asset type, design life and existing protection measures all matter.
Therefore, organizations should translate global climate science into asset-level risk assessment.
For long-lived infrastructure, teams can consider climate projections alongside historical design data, identify critical assets exposed to coastal hazards, test different future scenarios and evaluate adaptation options before vulnerabilities become expensive failures.
The objective is not to predict the future perfectly.
It is to make today’s engineering decisions more robust under a wider range of plausible future conditions.
The Bigger Sustainability Lesson
The latest Greenland and Antarctica ice loss data illustrates something broader about climate change.
A physical change thousands of kilometres away can eventually influence decisions involving ports, cities, utilities, property, insurance and infrastructure investment elsewhere.
That is why climate change cannot remain only a carbon-accounting conversation.
Mitigation asks how we reduce future warming.
Adaptation asks how we prepare for the changes already occurring and those still ahead.
Modern sustainability strategies increasingly require both.
For engineering organizations in particular, climate resilience may become one of the clearest areas where sustainability moves from reporting into actual design, operations and capital planning.
So, What’s the Takeaway?
11.3 trillion tonnes of ice loss is not merely an environmental statistic.
It represents a measurable physical change in the Earth system — one that has already contributed to global sea-level rise.
The IPCC concludes that continued ice-sheet mass loss and sea-level rise will have consequences extending far beyond the current planning cycle of many businesses and infrastructure projects.
For sustainability professionals, the message is to connect climate science with business risk.
For engineers, it is to think beyond historical design conditions.
And for organizations managing long-lived assets, the question is becoming increasingly practical:
Are we designing for the climate we had — or the climate our infrastructure will actually experience?
