First Signs of Melting Seen in East Antarctica
Filed under: Discovery,News & Resources
(Click to enlarge image) Queen Maud Land in East Antarctica is shown. A new set of satellite measurements indicate that glaciers in the East may have begun to succumb to warmer temperatures. (Credit: USGS)
Earth’s last great icy citadel, the East Antarctica Ice Sheet, is beginning to crumble.
(From Discovery News / by Michael Reilly) — Antarctica’s western ice sheet has been under siege from global warming for some time, with billions of tons of ice melting into the ocean each year and contributing to sea level rise. By contrast, the east has appeared to hold out, its mass staying stable.
Now a new set of satellite measurements indicate the East may have begun to succumb to warmer temperatures, losing as much as 57 billion tons of ice a year since 2006. There is still a lot of uncertainty in the readings, but if the readings hold up under scrutiny, it would mark an important change in the world’s largest ice sheet.
“This could be the beginning of a trend, but whether or not it’s a trend or just variability from year to year, we’re not sure,” Jianli Chen of the University of Texas at Austin said. Chen led a team of researchers on the study, which appeared yesterday in Nature Geoscience.
The team’s results in western Antarctica match up well with previous studies, which have found that the region is shedding around 196 billion tons of ice each year.
