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Antarctic Ice Sheets Crumbling into the Sea |
| Written by SerenaStargazer | |
| Saturday, 22 October 2005 | |
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Andy Shepherd of the University of Cambridge states that the edges of the Antarctic ice sheets are discharging into the sea faster than ever recorded. In an area around the Amundsen Sea in West Antarctica, the Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers are losing more than 110 kilometres of ice each year, three times as fast as a decade ago.
If these two glaciers were to disappear completely, by themselves they could raise worldwide sea levels by over a metre. The glaciers are shrinking because warmer ocean waters circulating between them are melting their bases.
Eric Rignot of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California says that in many places in Antarctica, faster flows have been triggered by floating ice shelves breaking up at the edges of the continent. |
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