A new study based on data from Europe’s Cryosat satellite shows the ice loss from the Antarctic continent has doubled in four years.
According to the study Antarctica is now losing an annual total of about 160 billion tonnes of ice, enough to push global sea levels up by 0.43mm a year.
A
new study shows that the Antarctica is now losing about 160 billion tonnes of ice a year, twice as much as when the continent was last surveyed.
The study authors divided the continent into three sectors, the West Antarctic, the East Antarctic, and the Antarctic Peninsula, which is the long finger of land reaching up to South America.
The study, based on data from Europe’s Cryosat satellite, warns that the melt loss is sufficient to push up global sea levels by 0.43mm per year.
Cryosat has been using a radar instrument specifically designed to measure the shape of the ice sheet.
The study found that losses in West Antarctica were almost a third greater now than over the period 2005–2011.
The new research published in Geophysical Research Letters comes out shortly after scientists at the University of California and NASA raised the alarm last week that the world has passed the ‘point of no return‘ on Antarctic glacier loss.
Those scientists cautioned that the Antarctic melt is now effectively unstoppable.
Cryosat was launched by the European Space Agency in 2010 to measure changes both in the South and North pole.
The new study includes three years of measurements from 2010 to 2013 and also updates older results obtained by previous observations.
“CryoSat has given us a new understanding of how Antarctica has changed over the last three years and allowed us to survey almost the entire continent,” lead author Dr Malcolm McMillan from the NERC Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at Leeds University, told Britain’s BBC.
The study found the ice sheet is falling by an average of almost 2.0cm a year.
In the three sectors, this equates to losses of 134 billion tonnes, three billion tonnes, and 23 billion tonnes of ice a year, respectively.
The East had been gaining ice in the previous study period, boosted by some exceptional snowfall, but it is now seen as broadly static in the new survey.
As expected, it is the western ice sheet that dominates the reductions.
Scientists have long considered it to be the most vulnerable to melting.
It has an area, called the Amundsen Sea Embayment, where six huge glaciers are currently undergoing a rapid retreat, all of them being eroded by the influx of warm ocean waters that scientists say are being drawn towards the continent by stronger winds whipped up by a changing climate.
