How many cubic kilometres of ice are locked up in the Antarctic ice sheet?
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Answer
About 27 million km3
If all of it melted, global sea level would rise by about 58 metres. In places the ice is more than 4 km thick.
How to estimate it
Volume is area times thickness. Antarctica covers about 14 million square kilometres, roughly one and a half times the United States. Drilling and radar show the ice is typically around 2 km thick, far more than any glacier elsewhere. 14,000,000 × 2 = 28 million cubic kilometres. The measured volume is about 27,000,000 km3.
Source: British Antarctic Survey (Bedmap2)
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