Antarctica Is Simply Melting!

By Alexander Toldt
03:56, January 16th 2008
65 votes
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Antarctica Is Simply Melting!

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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