This piece first appeared at Climate News Network.
LONDON—The glaciers of the West Antarctic may be in irreversible retreat, according to the evidence of satellite data analysed by scientists at the US space agency Nasa.
The study of 19 years of data, due to be reported in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, confirms the ominous news that the southern hemisphere is not just warming ? it is that it is warming in a way that speeds up the melting of the West Antarctic glaciers.
Long ago, glaciologists began to wonder whether the West Antarctic ice sheet was inherently unstable. The water locked in the ice sheet in the Amundsen Sea region—the area the Nasa researchers examined—is enough to raise global sea levels by more than a metre. If the whole West Antarctic ice sheet turned to water, sea levels would rise by at least five metres.
Birth of an iceberg: a massive crack in West Antarctica’s Pine Island glacier. Photo by NASA Earth Observatory via Wikimedia Commons.
Birth of an iceberg: a massive crack in West Antarctica’s Pine Island glacier. Photo by NASA Earth Observatory via Wikimedia Commons.
