A team of researchers who analyzed the Antarctic’s fastest melting region for about 21-years have now revealed that during the past 10 years, the melting rate of glaciers has tripled. The study was conducted by researchers at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), and NASA.
This is the first ever study that assessed and merged insights from four distinctive estimation procedures to develop a legitimate assessment of the amount and the rate of loss throughout the most recent two decades.
The Amundsen Sea Embayment glaciers, in West Antarctica are losing ice quicker than any other part of the Antarctic and are believed to be the significant Antarctica contributors to sea level rise. The study is published in the Geophysical Research Letters journal.
The study to confirm the melting in this part of Antarctica was carried out by a research group headed by author Tyler Sutterley, a doctoral candidate at UCI. Sutterley said, “Past studies had proposed that this area has begun to change significantly since the 1990s, and we needed to observe how all the distinctive methods looked at. The noteworthy harmony among the strategies provided for us certainty that we are getting this right”.
The analysts reunited estimations of the mass balance of glaciers streaming into the Amundsen Sea Embayment.
Mass balance is a term referred to the measure of much ice the glaciers gain and lose over time from accumulating or melting snow, releases of ice as icebergs, and different reasons. Estimations from each of the four methods were accessible from 2003 to 2009. Joined, the four information sets compass the years 1992 to 2013.
The four sets of perceptions incorporate NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellites, laser altimetry from NASA’s Operation Icebridge airborne campaign and the prior ICESat satellite, radar altimetry from the European Space Agency’s Envisat satellite, and mass budget analysis utilizing radars and the University of Utrecht’s Regional Atmospheric Climate Model.
