The Antarctic Peninsula is suffering though a harsh loss of glacier ice that appears to be worsening over time.
According to BBC News, authors of a study published in the journal Science used satellite observations to measure glacier loss over the past 10 years. For their research, they keyed in on one 750km stretch of coastline on the Peninsula's southwestern section.
"To date, the glaciers added roughly 300 cubic km of water to the ocean," study lead author Bert Wouters, a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Bristol, said in a press release. "That's the equivalent of the volume of nearly 350,000 Empire State Buildings combined.
"The fact that so many glaciers in such a large region suddenly started to lose ice came as a surprise to us.
"It shows a very fast response of the ice sheet: in just a few years the dynamic regime completely shifted."
Using data from the European Space Agency's (ESA) Cryosat 2 satellite, the researchers noticed some stability in the Peninsula's glaciers through 2009. After that point, they have been melting at an accelerated rate, contributing 56 billion tons of ice melt to the ocean per year.
"It appears that sometime around 2009, the ice shelf thinning and the subsurface melting of the glaciers passed a critical threshold which triggered the sudden ice loss. However, compared to other regions in Antarctica, the Southern Peninsula is rather understudied, exactly because it did not show any changes in the past, ironically," Wouters said. "To pinpoint the cause of the changes, more data need to be collected. A detailed knowledge of the geometry of the local ice shelves, the ocean floor topography, ice sheet thickness and glacier flow speeds are crucial to tell how much longer the thinning will continue."
