Antarctica’s floating ice shelves are thinning at a faster rate than previously believed, and the situation really started getting worse in the previous decade.  Scientists came to this realization by studying 18 years of satellite data from the European Space Agency (ESA).

“For the decade before 2003, ice-shelf volume for all Antarctica did not change much," said Fernando Paolo from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California, whose research is published in Science Magazine.  During this period, the total losses from these sheets of ice that extend from the continent amounted to 25 cubic kilometers per year. 

“Since then, volume loss has been significant,” Paolo said.  Those sheets got thinner and thinner, losing 320 cubic kilometers of mass per year.  “The western ice shelves have been persistently thinning for two decades, and earlier gains in the eastern ice shelves ceased in the most recent decade,” Paolo added.

It threatens to raise sea levels, which will eat away at our coastlines.

“A number of these ice shelves are holding back one meter to three meters of sea level rise in the grounded ice,” said Professor Helen Amanda Fricker of the Scripps Institute.  “And that means that ultimately this ice will be delivered into the oceans and we will see global sea-level rise on that order.”