Antarctic Ice Melt Rate Has Doubled Since 2010, Study Finds

A European Space Agency satellite has found that Antarctica has been shedding ice at an accelerated pace compared to when the continent was last surveyed, backing up other research that has detected similar trends. The study, accepted for publication in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, comes one week after other studies claimed that the "collapse" of some glaciers in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet may be inevitable, due to manmade global warming and other factors.

The new research, by a team of researchers in the U.K., used observations from the CryoSat-2 satellite to produce the first estimate of the volume and mass change of nearly the entire Antarctic ice sheet. The data used in the study included more than 455,000 independent estimates of changes in the land elevation of the vast ice sheets covering Antarctica, both in the western part of the continent, where ice is melting more rapidly, and in the east, where the ice is considered to be more stable, for the time being at least. Read more...