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Satellites monitoring the state of the White Continent indicate some 200 billion tonnes a year are now being lost to the ocean as a result of melting.
This is pushing up global sea levels by 0.6mm annually - a three-fold increase since 2012 when the last such assessment was undertaken.
Scientists report the new numbers in the journal Nature.
Governments will need to take account of the information and its accelerating trend as they plan future defences to protect low-lying coastal communities.
The researchers say the losses are occurring predominantly in the West of the continent, where warm waters are getting under and melting the fronts of glaciers that terminate in the ocean.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44470208
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0179-y
See also: Ars Technica, Phys Org and University of Leeds.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Friday June 15 2018, @01:13AM
As always, numbers related to climate change are being oversimplified and considered in isolation. The above mentioned NASA study said that ice was decreasing in West Antarctica, and increasing more than as much in East Antarctica. So what does this mean?
You can't tell from just that. One thing you would need to know was how the temperature of the ice in East Antarctica was changing.
There's a reason climate models can't get things right, and it isn't because it's easy, or because they have an agenda. It's because it really is too difficult to accurately model. So they use ensembles of models that are right more often that they're wrong, and predict where the models agree, and ignore when the models get too strange. The problem is that sometime it's the time when they're getting too strange that they're correct.
Face it, even weather is too difficult to predict well, and climate is nothing but a complex composite of weather. Loose predictions are easy, but when you try to get detailed, you're going to make mistakes. Yes, the sun will rise tomorrow, and it will probably be warmer at 2PM than at 7AM. And winter will be colder than summer. But when you want detailed information, errors creep in. (Even then, some days it's colder at 2PM than at 7AM, it's just that that's quite unusual.)
So you aren't going to get reliable climate models. What you can get are "best guesses". But the professional best guesses will be better than yours, and the further in the future you are predicting, the more true that is.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.