Antarctica's ice may be melting twice as fast as it was earlier this decade, according to data from the European Space Agency's (ESA) Cryosat satellite.

BBC News reported about 160 billion tons of Antarctica's ice is melting into the ocean per year. The new study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, takes its measurements from 2010 to 2013 and compares them to a period from 2005 to 2010.

Cyrosat split Antarctica into three regions: East, West and the Peninsula. The satellite then measured the height of each section's ice sheet through a cycle of snowfall adding mass and melting subtracting it. Cryosat found all three regions to be losing about two centimeters of ice sheet altitude each year.

"Cryosat has given us a new understanding of how Antarctica has changed over the last three years and allowed us to survey almost the entire continent," study lead author Dr. Malcolm McMillan from the NERC Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at Leeds University, U.K., told BBC News "We find that ice losses continue to be most pronounced in West Antarctica, along the fast-flowing ice streams that drain into the Amundsen Sea. In East Antarctica, the ice sheet remained roughly in balance, with no net loss or gain over the three-year period."

The satellite's data shows Western Antarctica losing the most ice, at about 134 billion tons per year while the Eastern region is losing about three billion per year and the Peninsula 23 billion. While snowfall had been reported to increase in previous studies, Cryosat found it to have leveled off recently.

The scientists said the Western section is most vulnerable because warm ocean water is exacerbating the rapid retreat of six large glaciers in the region. They said climate change has been the cause for the warmer oceans entering the region known as the Amundsen Sea Embayment.

"The peninsula is extremely rugged and previous satellite altimeters have always struggled to see its narrow glaciers," Andy Shepherd, also of Leeds University, told BBC News. "With Cryosat, we get remarkable coverage - better than anything that's been achieved before."