SoylentNews

c0lo [soylentnews.org] writes:

The European Space Agency started to crunch the data acquired during the Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) [esa.int] mission. ESA is able to report [esa.int] now that the loss of Antarctic ice for the duration of the program (Mar 2009 - Nov 2013) is significant enough to produce detectable gravity shifts.

Now, as I'm done with the sensationalism above, let's try to show some perspective:

1. between 2011 and 2014, Antarctica as a whole has been shrinking in volume by 125 cubic kilometres a year;
2. Phil Plait [wikipedia.org] (the Bad Astronomer) argues [slate.com] (with good supporting material, how else?) we are past the point of no return with the major Antarctic West Antarctic glacier collapse, which will contribute to the global sea levels with a rise of several meters over the next few hundred years
3. (relevant trivia) the GRACE [wikipedia.org] mission (JPL and German Aerospace Center) - still operational - offers a lower resolution for the gravity variation: flies 500km altitude and uses the variation of push/pull forces between two satellites on polar orbits 220km apart [nasa.gov].
   
   The GOCE satellite flew at lower altitude (235 km), used ionic propulsion to compensate for the drag and directly measured the g-force using three pairs of ultra-sensitive accelerometers arranged in three dimensions that responded to tiny variations in the 'gravitational tug' of Earth with an accuracy of 1e–5 m/s^2 (that's roughly 1e-6 of the standard g) and a spatial resolution under 100km.
   The spatial resolution is low enough to resolve the loss of ice by catchment basins [esa.int] and offer an insight on the dynamic of the ice loss (sorry, the URL for the animation is borken)

---

Original Submission