PERTH: Scientists have released the results of the best study yet of the floating ice shelves of the Antarctic and confirmed that they are thinning at an accelerated rate. Fernando Paolo and colleagues from Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego took data collected over 18 years from European radar satellites to form their assessment.
For the first nine years of the period, the total losses from these massive chunks of ice amounted to around 25 cubic km per year. However, in the second half of the period, this had jumped to the huge figure of 310 cubic km per year.