Glaciers and ice sheets have been melting at a fast speed as per recent research reports, but sea levels are not rising quite as quickly as anticipated by scientists. As per a new study, this is happening because continents have been absorbing more of the water before it flows into the oceans.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientists came to know about this after they measured changes in the gravity of Earth with twin satellites orbiting the planet in tandem. According to the study published in Science, over the last 10 years, water consumption on land has slowed the rate of sea level rise by nearly 20%, or about 1 millimeter per year.

Gravity’s force depends on mass, which means the more there is, more powerful is the gravitational attraction. Study’s lead author John T. Reager, a JPL hydrologist, said that and on Earth, water is the only thing heavy enough and mobile enough to affect the gravity of the planet. Reager said that water movement has one of the biggest effects on the gravity of Earth.

Every year, the planet’s continents cycle across 6 trillion tons of soil moisture, snow, surface water and groundwater. Then the stores of water are slowly released into the ocean that allows the process to start again. However, the strength of the cycle can differ from year to year, decade to decade because of natural unpredictability in the weather and climate.

But, during the previous century, the rate of sea level rise has fastened because of melting glaciers and ice sheets pouring more water into the oceans. Also, the volume of the sea has expanded due to warming temperatures.

According to estimates from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in the time period between April 2002 and November 2014, the years studied by Reager and his colleagues, the sea level has gone up at an average rate of 2.9 millimeters per year, roughly double the average rate noticed in the 20th century. It was speedy but not as quick as the scientists would have thought of.