An Antarctic glacier containing enough water to eventually raise global sea levels by five feet (1.5m) has been melting dramatically in the last two decades. This doomsday report is the result of landmark NASA research.
The finding brings new attention to the eastern coast of the coldest continent.
These observations challenge the view of glacier stability in East Antarctica
NASA
Scientists previously thought ice melt there was slower than on the disintegrating western peninsula.
The authors wrote: “These observations challenge the view of glacier stability in East Antarctica.”
The Denman Glacier receded almost three miles during the period of study, 1996 to 2018.
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What makes the glacier’s development all the more worrying is its massive size and the unusual shape of the land beneath it, which is divided into two flanks.
Where Denman meets the sea, its eastern side is protected from warming water by a tall, rocky ridge.
Its western flank is a target for higher-temperature currents washing in and melting ice.
The land under many glaciers slopes downward from the interior of the continent to the sea.
With Denman’s western flank, however, it is the reverse.
Denman’s land falls as far as two miles below sea-level, making it both the planet’s deepest canyon on land—and much more susceptible to ice loss.
The unusual slope extends almost 30 miles into the continent.
The new paper builds on a transformative discovery from December.
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This “redefined the high- and lower-risk sectors for rapid sea level rise from Antarctica.”
Both this week’s paper and last year’s work are expected to influence projections of sea-level rise for the coming centuries.
The current highest emission scenarios project global seas rising by a cataclysmic 8ft (2.4m) by 2100.
The researchers plan to continue closely monitoring the glacier using Italy’s Cosmo-SkyMed satellites.
The troubling report coincides with news the polar ice caps are melting six times faster than in the 1990s, according to the most complete analysis to date.
The ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica is tracking the worst-case climate warming scenario set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), scientists say.
Without rapid cuts to carbon emissions the analysis indicates there could be a rise in sea levels that would leave 400 million people exposed to coastal flooding each year by the end of the century.
Rising sea levels are the one of the most damaging long-term impacts of the climate crisis, and the contribution of Greenland and Antarctica is accelerating.
The new analysis updates and combines recent studies of the ice masses and predicts last year will prove to have been a record-breaking year when the most recent data is processed.
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