stylistic:style_transfer, linguistic:paraphrasing
Historical

Greenhouse gas emissions from human activities unbalance the Earth's energy budget and so cause an accumulation of heat. About 90% of that heat is added to ocean heat content, 1% is retained in the atmosphere and 3-4% goes to melt major parts of the cryosphere. Between 1994 and 2017, 28 trillion tonnes of ice were lost around the globe as the result. Arctic sea ice decline accounted for the single largest loss (7.6 trillion tonnes), followed by the melting of Antarctica's ice shelves (6.5 trillion tonnes), the retreat of mountain glaciers (6.1 trillion tonnes), the melting of the Greenland ice sheet (3.8 trillion tonnes) and finally the melting of the Antarctic ice sheet (2.5 trillion tonnes) and the limited losses of the sea ice in the Southern Ocean (0.9 trillion tonnes).

Other than the sea ice (which already displaces water due to Archimedes' principle), these losses are a major cause of sea level rise (SLR) and they are expected to intensify in the future. In particular, the melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet may accelerate substantially as the floating ice shelves are lost and can no longer buttress the glaciers. This would trigger poorly understood marine ice sheet instability processes, which could then increase the SLR expected for the end of the century (between 30 cm (1 ft) and 1 m (3 + 1 ⁄ 2 ft), depending on future warming), by tens of centimeters more.

Ice loss in Greenland and Antarctica also produces large quantities of fresh meltwater, which disrupts the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) and the Southern Ocean overturning circulation, respectively. These two halves of the thermohaline circulation are very important for the global climate. A continuation of high meltwater flows may cause a severe disruption (up to a point of a "collapse") of either circulation, or even both of them. Either event would be considered an example of tipping points in the climate system, because it would be extremely difficult to reverse. AMOC is generally not expected to collapse during the 21st century, while there is only limited knowledge about the Southern Ocean circulation.

Another example of ice-related tipping point is permafrost thaw. While the organic content in the permafrost causes CO and methane emissions once it thaws and begins to decompose, ice melting liqufies the ground, causing anything built above the former permafrost to collapse. By 2050, the economic damages from such infrastructure loss are expected to cost tens of billions of dollars.