The volume of Antarctic ice detected to be melting into the ocean has doubled in less than a decade. The ice lost from Antarctica is causing global sea levels to rise by 0.45mm a year, according to three years of satellite observations.
Andrew Shepherd, of the University of Leeds, the leader of the study, said that most of the ice loss was due to increased melting but some could be attributed to a better system of measurement.
The study found that the Antarctic ice sheet was losing an average of 159 billion tonnes of ice each year, twice as much as when it was surveyed from 2005 to 2010. Researchers used measurements collected by the European Space Agency’s CryoSat-2 satellite.
Most of the melting was