Increasing amounts of ice mass have been lost from West Antarctica and the Antarctic peninsula over the past ten years, according to research from the University of Bristol and published online this week in Nature Geoscience.
Meanwhile the ice mass in East Antarctica has been roughly stable, with neither loss nor accumulation over the past decade.
Professor Jonathan Bamber at the University of Bristol and colleagues estimated the flux of ice from the ice sheet into the ocean from satellite data that cover 85% of Antarctica’s coastline, which they compared with simulations of snow accumulation over the same period, obtained using a regional climate model.
They arrived at a best estimate of a loss of 132 billion tonnes of ice in 2006 from West Antarctica
Social Profiles