West Antarctic Region Sheds Mount Everest of Ice Every 2 Years: Study

Parts of the Antarctic ice sheet are melting faster than anyone expected.

"For centuries, exploration of the remote Amundsen Sea was an exercise in futility. Too distant. Too cold. Too much ice. The first ship didn’t reach the nearby continental shelf until 1774. Then decades later, in the mid-1800s, one voyage commanded by American William Walker of the Flying Fish was repelled by ice and bad weather. A century after that, a report shows there was even less luck when “persistent sea ice cover, thickened by heavy snowfall,” defeated the U.S. Navy’s Eltanin.

Things, however, are beginning to change — and change faster than anyone anticipated, according to a new study published in the Geophysical Research Letters. Despite its formidable lineage, the Amundsen Sea is widely recognized as the weakest link in the West Antarctic’s splintering chain of ice sheets. But only now is it becoming clear just how fast change is coming.

There, the melting rate tripled in the past decade. Since 1992, the researchers found, the loss rate accelerated by 6.1 gigatons per year. Between 2003 and 2009, that rate nearly tripled to 16.3 gigatons per year. That surge in the melt rate, according to scientists at the University of California at Irvine, means the region, in the past 21 years, shed a Mount Everest-sized amount of ice every two years."

Terrence McCoy reports for the Washington Post December 3, 2014.

SEE ALSO:

"Major Deltas 'Could Be Drowned'" (BBC)

"Here’s What Your City Will Look Like When the Ice Sheets Melt" (Grist)