Antarctic Glaciers Melting Faster -Study
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Glaciers once held up by a floating ice shelf off Antarctica are now sliding off into the sea -- and they are going fast, scientists said on Tuesday.
Two separate studies from climate researchers and the space agency NASA show the glaciers are flowing into Antarctica's Weddell Sea, freed by the 2002 breakup of the Larsen B ice shelf.
Writing in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the researchers said their satellite measurements suggest climate warming can lead to rapid sea level rise.
The teams at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said the findings also prove that ice shelves hold back glaciers.
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The affected area is at the far northern tip of the Antarctic, just south of Chile and Argentina. Temperatures there have risen by up to 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit (2.5 degrees C) in the past 60 years -- faster than almost any region in the world.
In the past 30 years, ice shelves in the region have lost more than 5,200 square miles of area.
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The Ross ice shelf, for example, is the main outlet for the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, with several large glaciers that could, if they melted completely, raise sea levels by 16 feet.
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