Meltdown in Antarctica

Monday, 23 November 2009 10:57

New research published in the scientific journal Nature Geoscience shows that several million tons of ice from especially the eastern part of Antarctica has melted since 2006.

The result is very surprising to scientists as the Antarctic area has been almost unaffected by global warming so far. The research also shows that the ice in the more unstable western Antarctica has melted faster than expected.

Scientists fear that global warming will lead to a faster melting of the huge amounts of ice in the western arctic, which at the moment contains enough ice to raise the global sea levels by five meters, if the ice melts.

In 2007, IPCC predicted that the sea levels could rise between 18 and 59 centimetres before 2100. However, this calculation did not take into account that the ice on Greenland, the Arctic regions and Antarctica is melting too.

An international team led by Michiel van den Broeke at Utrecht University in the Netherlands found that, on average, the Greenlandic ice sheet lost a total of about 1500 gigatons of mass between 2000 and 2008, equivalent to about 0.46 millimetres of global sea level rise per year. The loss of mass during this time was split equally between surface processes, such as melting, and the physical discharge of large chunks of ice into the ocean.

From 2006 to 2008, the rate of ice loss accelerated, mostly due to high rates of summer surface melting, reaching 273 gigatons of mass per year, or 0.75 millimetres of annual sea level rise.

Source: Nature Reports and Politiken, Denmark