ANTARCTICA: Climatic changes appear to be destabilising vast ice sheets of western Antarctica that had previously seemed relatively protected from global warming, researchers report, raising the prospect of faster sea-level rise than current estimates.
While the overall loss is a tiny fraction of the miles-deep ice that covers much of Antarctica, scientists said the new finding is important because the continent holds about 90 per cent of Earth's ice and, until now, large-scale ice loss there had been limited to the peninsula that juts out toward the tip of South America.
Researchers also found that the rate of ice loss in the affected areas has accelerated over the past 10 years - as it has on most glaciers around the world.
"Without doubt, Antarctica as a whole is now losing ice yearly and each year it's losing more," said Eric Rignot, lead author of a paper published online in the journal Nature Geoscience.
The Antarctic ice sheet is shrinking despite land temperatures remaining essentially unchanged, except for the fast-warming peninsula. The cause, Mr Rignot said, may be changes in the flow of the warmer water of the Antarctic circumpolar current that circles much of the continent.
Because of changed wind patterns and less-well-understood dynamics of the submerged current, its water is coming closer to land in some sectors and melting glaciers edges deep underwater.
Mr Rignot said the tonnage of yearly ice loss in Antarctica was approaching that of Greenland, where ice sheets are known to be melting rapidly in some parts and where ancient glaciers have been in retreat. He said the change in Antarctica could become considerably more dramatic because the continent's western shelf, an expanse of ice and snow roughly the size of Texas, is largely below sea level and has broad expanses of ice that could move quickly.
The new finding comes days after the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said the group's next report should look at the "frightening" possibility that ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica could melt rapidly at the same time.