Canada’s glaciers are heading for a likely irreversible melt that will push up sea levels, a new study shows.

As much as 20 per cent of glacier ice in the Canadian Arctic could vanish by the end of this century; it would add 3.5 centimetres to sea levels.

“We believe the mass loss is irreversible in the foreseeable future,” wrote authors of the study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

The Canadian Arctic is the world’s third largest store of glacier ice after Greenland and Antarctica — about 155,000 square kilometres of ice spread across 36,000 islands.

Using computer models, scientists in Netherlands and the U.S. demonstrated how glaciers would respond to future climate change: they say it is “highly likely” the ice is going to melt at an alarming rate even if global warming slows down.

The projection of a 20 per cent loss is based on a scenario in which world temperatures will rise by 3C this century and by 8C in the Canadian Arctic due to global warming. It is consistent with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s projections.

The scientists calculated that by 2100, when the Arctic is eight degrees Celsius warmer, the rate of ice loss will be a whopping 144 gigatons per year, up from the present rate of 92 gigatons. One gigaton is one billion metric tonnes.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) summer melts on the Arctic ice sheet have recently been breaking records and once the glaciers are gone, they are unlikely to make a comeback.

A complete melt of the glaciers would take many centuries but climate change is warming the Arctic faster than the global average.

In September 2012, scientists revealed that sea ice in the Arctic had shrunk to its smallest extent ever recorded. Frozen sea had decreased to about 3.5 million square kilometres — less than half what it was just four decades ago.

Glaciers in the Canadian Arctic are not studied as much as the ice in Alaska and Russia

“Most attention goes out to Greenland and Antarctica which is understandable because they are the two largest ice bodies in the world,” Michiel van den Broeke, a co-author of the study at Utrecht University, told Reuters.

Canadian ice should also be included in calculations, he said.

Observations from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites show that this massive sheet of ice shed approximately 580 gigatons.

Related: Arctic scientists see Canada slipping on world stage

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With files from Star wire services

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