Worrying ice losses are rapidly spreading deep into the Antarctic’s interior, the latest satellite data analysis shows. A warming Southern Ocean is resulting in Antarctic glaciers melting increasingly rapidly. And ice is now being lost five times faster than in the 1990s.
The West Antarctic ice sheet was stable in 1992 but up to a quarter of its expanse is now thinning.
And more than 320ft (100m) of ice thickness has been lost in the worst-hit places.
The West Antarctic ice sheet’s annihilation would drive global sea levels approximately five metres, decimating coastal cities world-wide.
The current losses are doubling every decade, the scientists said, and sea level rise are now running at the extreme end of even the most recent estimations.
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The latest study compared 800 million satellite measurements of ice sheet height from 1992 to 2017 with weather information.
This distinguished short-term changes owing to varying snowfall from long-term changes owing to climate.
Professor Andy Shepherd, of Leeds University, who led the study, said: “From a standing start in the 1990s, thinning has spread inland progressively over the past 25 years – that is rapid in glaciological terms.
“The speed of drawing down ice from an ice sheet used to be spoken of in geological timescales, but that has now been replaced by people’s lifetimes.”
Professor Shepherd added the thinning of some ice streams had extended 300 miles inland along their 600-mile length.
He said: “More than 50 percent of the Pine Island and Thwaites glacier basins have been affected by thinning in the past 25 years.
“We are past halfway and that is a worry.”
Researchers already knew that ice was being lost from West Antarctica, but the new work pinpoints where it is happening and how rapidly.
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This will enable more accurate projections to be made of sea level rises and may aid preparations for these rises.
In the recent past, snow falling on to Antarctica’s glaciers balanced the ice lost as icebergs calved off into the ocean.
But now the glaciers are flowing faster than snow can replenish them.
Professor Shepherd added: “In parts of Antarctica, the ice sheet has thinned by extraordinary amounts.”