Sentences with phrase «mass in a matter of decades»

For their study, Hansen and his colleagues combined ancient paleo - climate data with new satellite readings and an improved model of the climate system to demonstrate that ice sheets can melt at a «non-linear» rate: rather than an incremental melting as Earth's poles inexorably warm, ice sheets might melt at exponential rates, shedding dangerous amounts of mass in a matter of decades, not millennia.