Leading scientists have warned in a new study that the world's glaciers seem to be melting at a rate far faster than anticipated, raising serious concerns amid the global climate emergency.

A study that combined data from more than 230 regional estimates and conducted by 35 teams of scientists across the globe has revealed that glaciers are melting at a shocking rate – much faster than previously predicted.

Since the year 2000, about 5% of the world's glacier ice has melted, the equivalent of 6500 billion tons of ice. As action stalls on climate change, the pace of this ice melt is becoming exponentially greater.

"Since 2000, glaciers have lost between 2% and 39% of their ice regionally and about 5% globally," the study reveals in its abstract.

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"Glacier mass loss is about 18% larger than the loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet and more than twice that from the Antarctic Ice Sheet," the scientists found.

"Our results arise from a scientific community effort to collect, homogenize, combine and analyze glacier mass changes from in situ and remote-sensing observations."

Speaking to BBC News, the study's lead author Michael Zemp, who's also the director of the World Glacier Monitoring Service, used an analogy to put the pure scale of the ice melt into perspective.

The rate of ice loss equates to an average of 270 billion tons every year, which Zemp says "corresponds to the water consumption of the entire global population in 30 years, assuming 3 liters per person and day."

What makes the study important is not only that it established such a shocking rate of glacier melt, but that it does so using evidence from right across the world.

Zemp warns that the only way to save the glaciers is to take action on climate change, as every degree risks worsening ice melts.

"Every tenth of a degree of warming that we can avoid will save some glaciers, and will save us from a lot of damage," he told the BBC.