A new study found that the Antarctica melting rate has tripled during the last decade, causing an ice loss equivalent to the weight of Mount Everest.
Researchers at NASA and the University of California at Irvine did a 21-year analysis on the glaciers in the Amundsen Sea Embayment, where the melting rate is fastest compared to other regions of Antarctica. The team used four measurement techniques to estimate the amount of ice loss for the past two decades.
"The mass loss of these glaciers is increasing at an amazing rate," scientist Isabella Velicogna, jointly of the UC Irvine and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, announced in a press release.
Study leader Tyler Sutterley, a UCI doctoral candidate, is confident that the calculations are accurate. The researchers measured the mass balance, or the amount of ice gained and lost over a specific period of time due to melting of ice, from 2003 to 2009 using the four techniques. The data was compared to another data set dated from 1992 to 2013.
The computation showed that the total amount of ice loss in the Antarctica is an average of 83 gigatons per year (91.5 billion U.S. tons). This weight, when computed for 21 years, is equivalent to the water weight of 10.5 Mt. Everest, which weighs 161 gigatons.
The speed of ice loss average 6.1 gigatons (6.7 billion U.S. tons) per year since 1992, but this tripled to 16.3 gigatons beginning in 2003.
The tools used for the techniques include NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites, laser altimetry from NASA's Operation IceBridge airborne campaign and earlier ICESat satellite, radar altimetry from the European Space Agency's Envisat satellite, mass budget analyses using radars and the University of Utrecht's Regional Atmospheric Climate Model.
Researchers also studied the ice loss level in Antarctica to predict future sea levels.
"This is going to impact sea level," Velicogna told Businessweek. "I don't see it stopping.
This study will be published in the Dec. 5 issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
