Antarctica ice loss has tripled in 10 years

Global warming has caused more than 3 trillion tons of ice to melt from Antarctica since 1992, and ice loss has tripled there in the past decade, a new study finds.

The total is equivalent to more than 4 quintillion gallons of water added to the world’s oceans, making Antarctica’s melting ice sheets one of the largest contributors to rising sea levels. That amount of water is enough to fill more than a billion swimming pools and cover Texas to a depth of nearly 13 feet.

“Even though Antarctica is far from most human civilization, its ice sheet is losing mass to the ocean, and is an increasing contribution to sea-level rise,” said study co-author Helen Amanda Fricker of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. This “will have large impacts on coastlines all around all the world.”

“The future we choose could determine when we need to rebuild airports, cities and infrastructure so that we can become resilient to such changes,” she said.

The study, published Wednesday in the British journal Nature, is the most complete analysis yet to measure Antarctica’s ice sheet changes. Overall, scientists say the melting ice in Antarctica is responsible for about one-third of all sealevel rise around the world.

Scientists says the cause is the warming world, with temperatures boosted by the increased amount of carbon dioxide humanity emits from the burning of fossil fuels.