Antarctic Ice Shelf Thinning at a Much Quicker Rate Than Previously Measured

A team of scientists has determined the ice shelves in Antarctica are thinning at a quicker rate than previously measured.

According to BBC News, authors of a study published in the journal Science say they have obtained the best perspective on the matter to date. They analyzed 18 years of satellite data and noticed the thinning rate in the latter half of that period was much faster than the first half.

"Eighteen percent over the course of 18 years is really a substantial change," study lead author Fernando Paolo, a graduate student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California - San Diego, said in a press release. "Overall, we show not only the total ice shelf volume is decreasing, but we see an acceleration in the last decade."

In the first half of the nearly two-decade period, the ice shelf melt was calculated at 25 cubic km a year, a rate that jumped to 310 cubic km a year.

"For the decade before 2003, ice-shelf volume for all Antarctica did not change much," Paolo told BBC News. "Since then, volume loss has been significant. The western ice shelves have been persistently thinning for two decades, and earlier gains in the eastern ice shelves ceased in the most recent decade."

Ice melt contributes to a rise in the global sea level, but it is part of a natural process that ice shelf thinning does not agree with.

"If this thinning continues at the rates we report, some of the ice shelves in West Antarctica that we've observed will disappear by the end of this century," study co-author Helen Amanda Fricker, a glaciologist at Scripps, told BBC News. "A number of these ice shelves are holding back 1m to 3m of sea level rise in the grounded ice. And that means that ultimately this ice will be delivered into the oceans and we will see global sea-level rise on that order."