Glaciers are melting much faster than previously thought in Antarctica, contributing to rising sea levels that could swamp island nations and flood coastal communities.
The scientists at the University of California, Irvine, and NASA found melt rates of glaciers in the Amundsen Sea Embayment in West Antarctica have tripled during the last decade. They also found these glaciers were "hemorrhaging ice faster than any other part of Antarctica and are the most significant Antarctic contributors to sea level rise."
"The mass loss of these glaciers is increasing at an amazing rate," said Isabella Velicogna, jointly of UCI and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. She co-authored a study on the results which will be published in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.