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Global warming is still there, no
matter whether you like the topic or not!
According to a climate
researcher’s recent statement, over the last ten years Antarctica
lost billions of tons of ice, in a process that is contributing to the phenomenon
of the rising seas around the world.
Eric Rignot and his team wrote
about this more and more dangerous process in the journal Nature Geoscience and
warned about the ice melted from two particular parts of the southern
continent. Rignot’s team used satellites and monitored most of the continent’s
coastline; thus, they were able to estimate that in 2006 West
Antarctica lost 132 billions tons of ice, compared to only 83
billion tons in 1996. On the other hand the Antarctic Peninsula, which
stretches toward South America, lost no less
than 60 billion tons of ice in 2006.
According to co-author Jonathan
Bamber of the University
of Bristol, 4 billion
tons of ice means enough water to provide more than 60 million people with the necessary
daily liquid.
Researchers noted that this ice
loss does not come from the so-called ice sheets covering the water around the
continent, but from the glaciers covering much the continent’s land mass. This
is why the process contributes also to the sea level rise phenomenon in a way
sea ice does not.
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