Paris: Billions of tonnes of meltwater flowing into the world's oceans from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets could boost extreme weather and destabilise regional climate within a matter of decades, researchers said Wednesday.
Most studies on ice sheets have focused on how quickly they might shrink due to global warming, and how much global temperatures can rise before their disintegration - whether over centuries or millenia - becomes inevitable, a threshold known as a "tipping point."
The IPCC's last major assessment in 2013 did not take ice sheets - today seen as the major contributor, ahead of thermal expansion and glaciers - into account for lack of data.