Antarctic glaciers are losing in water weight the equivalent of Mt Everest every two years, with melting rates on part of the continent tripling over the past decade.
A 21-year analysis by NASA and the University of California at Irvine found that glaciers in the Amundsen Sea Embayment, Antarctica’s fastest-melting region, lost an average of 83 gigatons of ice a year from 1992 to 2013, according to a statement today from the American Geophysical Union, which is publishing the findings in its journal. Earth’s highest peak weighs about 161 gigatons.
“Most of the mass was lost in the last 10 years — things happened way faster,” Isabella Velicogna, one of the paper’s authors, said today in a phone interview.
Glaciers in the Amundsen Sea area contain enough water to raise global sea levels by 1.2 metres, according to estimates from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. As the planet warms, monitoring changes in global ice sheets will be critical, Velicogna said.
“That’s why we care about this area,” she said. “There’s a lot of water stored, a lot of ice.”
The researchers evaluated four sets of data ranging from 1992 through 2013 that showed the pace at which glaciers disappeared accelerated by an average of 6.1 gigatons a year. In the years where all of those data sets overlapped — 2003 to 2009 — the melt rate jumped to 16.3 gigatons per year.
“This is going to impact sea level,” she said. “I don’t see it stopping.
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