Antarctica's ice is melting faster than expected and the accelerated thawing of the massive Antarctic Peninsula has become Antarctica's second-largest contributor to inexorably rising sea levels worldwide.
A 173,530 square kilometer (67,000 square mile) chunk of the Antarctica Peninsula has been swiftly melting into the ocean since 2009, a fact only now discovered by scientists. What stunned British scientists that discovered this dismaying catastrophe is the scientific community previously thought this chunk was stable. In size, the chunk now melting is larger than Florida.
"This is a big signal," said study lead author Bert Wouters at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom. "We were quite stunned by it."
The newly discovered ice-melt is now Antarctica's second-largest contributor to rising sea levels. It's adding some 55 trillion liters of water a year to the world's oceans.
"Right now, that's something like 0.16 millimeters, so it's not like we all need to run to the hills," Wouters says. "But you add up all the contributions to sea level -- the rest of Antarctica and Greenland and the Arctic -- it's all moving faster and faster. And that's reason to be concerned."
He said the ice here only began to melt "really fast," in 2009.
"Up to 2009, it's just a flat line, and then 2009 it just went up. Out of the blue it became the second-largest contributor to sea-level rise in Antarctica," he noted.
This discovery came a week after NASA announced one of the Antarctica's largest floating ice shelves will "disintegrate completely" by the end of this decade.
The Antarctic Peninsula is the northernmost part of the mainland of Antarctica located at the base of the Southern Hemisphere. It's a part of the world experiencing extraordinary warming.
Each decade for the last five, average temperatures in the Antarctic Peninsula have risen by half a degree Celsius.
Ice mass loss on the peninsula occurred at a rate of 60 billion tonnes in 2006, with the greatest change occurring in the northern tip of the peninsula. Seven ice shelves along the Antarctic Peninsula have retreated or disintegrated over the last two decades.
The unexpectedly rapid thawing of the Antarctic Peninsula might even affect the Earth's gravitational field, said the scientists.
The study that led to these conclusions was led by a team from the University of Bristol and published in Science magazine, according to the BBC.
Researchers made extensive use of 10-years' worth of data provided by the European Space Agency's CryoSat-2 satellite.
Using this data, the team developed a model to map how the height of ice has changed over the years across Antarctica.