Glaciers flowing into Antarctica's Amundsen Sea are some of the fastest melting on the continent — and in recent years have lost ice at an ever-quicker rate.
Different remote-sensing techniques have yielded slightly different estimates for the amount of ice melting from the Amundsen glaciers. Tyler Sutterley of the University of California, Irvine, and his colleagues compared and reconciled four ice-measuring methods. They found that between 2003 and 2009, the disappearance of Amundsen ice accelerated at a rate nearly three times faster than over the whole period between 1992 and 2013.
The findings boost confidence in the various ice-measuring methods and confirm just how quickly these glaciers are funnelling ice into the sea.
Geophys. Res. Lett. http://doi.org/xms (2014)
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Antarctic ice loss accelerates. Nature 516, 146 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/516146d
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/516146d