ANTARCTICA FOUND TO BE MELTING FASTER THAN THOUGHT

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WASH POST - Climatic changes appear to be destabilizing vast ice sheets
of western Antarctica that had previously seemed relatively protected
from global warming, researchers reported yesterday, raising the
prospect of faster sea-level rise than current estimates. While the
overall loss is a tiny fraction of the miles-deep ice that covers much
of Antarctica, scientists said the new finding is important because the
continent holds about 90 percent of Earth's ice, and until now,
large-scale ice loss there had been limited to the peninsula that juts
out toward the tip of South America. In addition, researchers found that
the rate of ice loss in the affected areas has accelerated over the past
10 years -- as it has on most glaciers and ice sheets around the world.
. .

Rignot said the tonnage of yearly ice loss in Antarctica is approaching
that of Greenland, where ice sheets are known to be melting rapidly in
some parts and where ancient glaciers have been in retreat. He said the
change in Antarctica could become considerably more dramatic because the
continent's western shelf, an expanse of ice and snow roughly the size
of Texas, is largely below sea level and has broad and flat expanses of
ice that could move quickly. . .

The new finding comes days after the head of the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change said the group's next report should look at the
"frightening" possibility that ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica
could melt rapidly at the same time.

"Both Greenland and the West Antarctic ice sheet are huge bodies of ice
and snow, which are sitting on land," said Rajendra Pachauri, chief of
the IPCC, the United Nations' scientific advisory group. "If, through a
process of melting, they collapse and are submerged in the sea, then we
really are talking about sea-level rises of several meters." (A meter is
about a yard.) Last year, the IPCC tentatively estimated that sea levels
would rise by eight inches to two feet by the end of the century,
assuming no melting in West Antarctica.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/13/
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