LONDON: A new study has recorded a sudden and rapid thinning of once-stable glaciers along the southern Antarctic Peninsula, demonstrating that significant changes in glacier mass can occur surprisingly quickly as ocean and air temperatures rise.
The findings support what researchers have been seeing in other parts of Antarctica, with scientists warning last year that four key glaciers on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet appear to be on the verge of wholesale retreat with nothing to stop them.
The new study points to a common cause among the glaciers it studied: Warm water is melting away the underside of the glaciers where they meet the sea floor, weakening the ice shelves that slow the glaciers’ slide the ocean. The researchers “observe a relatively strong [common] response across multiple glacier systems that clearly points to changing ocean condition as the main culprit,” says Alex Gardner, a glaciologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., who was not a part of the study, in an e-mail.
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