Antarctica ice loss accelerating

Global warming is melting ice in Antarctica faster than ever before – about six times more a year now than 40 years ago – leading to increasingly high sea levels worldwide, scientists warned on Monday.

Already, Antarctic melting has raised global sea levels more than 1.4cm between 1979 and 2017, the report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed US journal, said.

And the pace of melting is expected to lead to a disastrous sea level rise in the years to come, according to lead author Eric Rignot, chair of Earth system science at the University of California, Irvine.

“As the Antarctic ice sheet continues to melt away, we expect multi-metre sea level rise from Antarctica in the coming centuries,” Rignot said.

A rise of 1.8m by 2100, as some scientists forecast in worst-case scenarios, would flood many coastal cities that are home to millions of people around the world.

For the current study, researchers embarked on the longest-ever assessment of ice mass in the Antarctic, across 18 geographic regions.

Researchers discovered that from 1979 to 1990, Antarctica shed an average of 40-billion tons of ice mass annually.

By the years 2009 to 2017, the ice loss had increased more than sixfold, to 252-billion tons a year. –