Kijun Times

The study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, has been described as the most exhaustive analysis ever conducted on the changes to Antarctica’s ice sheet. The research involved more than 80 scientists from 44 international organizations and used data taken from multiple satellites, as well as air and ground measurements and computer simulations.  

“We took all the estimates across all the different techniques, and we got this consensus,” Isabella Velicogna, an Antarctic ice expert at the University of California at Irvine, told The Washington Post. 

The research shows that Antarctica has lost almost 3 trillion tons of ice since 1992. Of that loss, 40 percent took place from 2012 to 2017.

Lead author Andrew Shepherd of the University of Leeds told NPR that prior to 2012, Antarctica’s ice losses had been contributing a “relatively small proportion” to global sea level rise. Since then, however, the melt rate has increased dramatically from an average of about 84 billion tons a year between 1992 and 2011, to more than 241 billion tons a year from 2012 to 2017. 

“The ice sheet is now losing three times as much ice,” Shepherd told NPR, adding that the annual sea level rise attributed to Antarctica has similarly tripled ― from 0.2 mm to 0.6 mm.

“That’s a big jump, and it did catch us all by surprise,” Shepherd said.

It’s “possible that Antarctica alone can add about half a foot to sea level rise by the end of the century,” Shepherd said in an interview with The Associated Press. He noted that climate change is the only plausible cause of this increased ice melt.