Antarctic Ice thickness Change Between 1992 and 2017 (IMAGE)
Caption
By combining 25 years of ESA satellite data, scientists have discovered that warming ocean waters have caused the ice to thin so rapidly that 24% of the glaciers in West Antarctica are now affected. A paper published in Geophysical Research Letters describes how the UK Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling (CPOM) used over 800 million measurements of the height of the Antarctic ice sheet recorded by radar altimeter instruments on ESA's ERS-1, ERS-2, Envisat, and CryoSat satellite missions between 1992 and 2017. They used simulations of snowfall produced by the RACMO regional climate model to identify changes that were due to glacier dynamics alone (green contours). In some places, the glacier thinning has spread far inland during the survey period.
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CPOM
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