Farewell, great lakes of ice and frozen rivers.

Scientists used satellite images and gravity measurements to peer more closely than ever before at the torturous drip-drip-drip from the world’s glaciers. What they discovered is not really much of a surprise: Ice Age glaciers have been methodically chiseled away by the warming effects of fossil fuel burning.

Global warming and black carbon are working fast: Glaciers outside of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are collectively losing an estimated 571 trillion pounds worth of ice annually, the researchers reported in a paper published Thursday in the journal Science.

Glaciers? Icesheets? Potatoes, potatoes, you say. Here’s the difference: The world’s ice sheets cover vast swaths in Greenland and Antarctica. Meanwhile, glaciers are rivers and lakes of slow-moving ice. You can find them at high altitudes in alpine regions around the world, and you’ll find them in lower elevations (including on and around ice sheets) as you approach the poles.

Although these glaciers contain just 1 percent of land ice reserves, they contribute about as much to the rising seas as the melting ice sheets. The individual contributions of glaciers to the rising seas may be relatively small, but the cumulative impacts of their melts are substantial.

The researchers concluded that melting glaciers are causing the oceans to surge by 0.03 inches yearly, which works out to 30 percent of the total annual rise in recorded sea levels.