Scientists have described the flowing water as “upside-down rivers”, scientifically known as ‘basal channels’, of warm ocean water which carve their way through the Antarctic ice shelves. Ice shelves are extensions of landmass which float around the continent and make up the Antarctic ice sheets. Three-quarters of Antarctica is surrounded by these ice shelves, so if they continue to melt away, as is happening with climate change, then sea levels will rise.
Glaciologist Karen Alley from the College of Wooster in Ohio said: “Warm water circulation is attacking the undersides of these ice shelves at their most vulnerable points.
“These effects matter. But exactly how much, we don’t yet know. We need to.”
Glaciologist Ted Scambos from the University of Colorado Boulder said: “We’re seeing a new process, where warm water cuts into the shelf from below.
“Like scoring a plate of glass, the trough renders the shelf weak, and in a few decades, it’s gone, freeing the ice sheet to ride out faster into the ocean.”
The problem, the researchers said, is that as more ice shelves melt away, the rest become weaker, allowing basal channels to more easily make their way through the ice sheets.
However, these basal channels are not accounted for in standard climate change models, and the researchers said they need to be quickly incorporated.
The team said in their paper published in the journal Science Advances: “Floating ice shelves of fast-flowing ice streams are prone to rift initiation and calving originating along zones of rapid shearing at their margins.
“Predicting future ice-shelf destabilisation under a warming ocean scenario, with the resultant reduced buttressing, faster ice flow, and sea-level rise, therefore requires an understanding of the processes that thin and weaken these shear margins.
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“Critically, in our modern warming climate, warming of sub-ice shelf water may already be causing basal channel deepening in shear margins, which could strongly affect buttressing and may lead to enhanced calving and ice mass loss.”
Previous research has shown that Antarctica is losing a staggering 200 billion tonnes a year of ice.
Not only does the ice caps melting lead to rising sea levels, but it will contribute to more natural disasters.
Andrew Shepherd, a professor of earth observation at the University of Leeds and lead author of an earlier study published in the journal Nature, said: “Around Brooklyn you get flooding once a year or so, but if you raise sea level by 15 centimetres then that’s going to happen 20 times a year.”
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According to Google’s interactive map, FireTree, a two metre rise could ruin the Netherlands, with most of the country submerged.
In the UK, the north of Scotland would suffer a similar fate and large swathes of the east of England would become uninhabitable.
Low lying New York would also be heavily damaged amid rapidly rising sea levels.