A new study reveals Antarctica is losing ice far more rapidly than previously thought, after satellite imagery showed the effects of warmer water on an area once believed to be stable.
The study, released Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, indicates East Antarctica is actually losing 51 billion metric tons of ice a year.
“We did not know about the mass loss in eastern Antarctica, which is a big part of Antarctica resting on a high elevation on bedrock, mostly above sea level,” Eric Rignot, an ice scientist at the University of California, Irvine and the lead author of the study, told CTV News Channel on Tuesday.
The researchers used satellite imagery and atmospheric climate models to track ice loss across 176 Antarctic basins from 1979 to 2017. They found the continent has been losing 252 billion metric tons of ice annually since 2009, compared to just 40 billion metric tons annually in the 1980s.
Rignot says the temperatures in Antarctica aren’t warm enough to melt the surface ice, but the warm ocean waters crashing along the shores contribute to the ice melt.
“All the areas of significant mass loss that we find in these studies are looking very close to sources of warm ocean water,” he said.
Rignot added that the warm water makes it to Antarctica in large part due to the prevailing winds in the area, which have increased in recent years due to climate change.
“We’re on a path where global sea level will rise about one metre by the end of this century, but we cannot exclude that it’s going to go beyond that,” he said. “At the end of this century, it will keep increasing even faster, but that also depends on what we do with our climate system.”
With files from The Associated Press
