Antarctica's coastal glaciers are shedding icebergs more rapidly than nature can replenish the crumbling ice, doubling previous estimates of losses from the world's largest ice sheet over the past 25 years, a satellite analysis showed on Wednesday.
An aerial view of the 200-foot-tall front of the Getz Ice Shelf with cracks, in Antarctica, in this undated handout image. NASA/Handout via REUTERSLOS ANGELES, Aug 10 - Antarctica's coastal glaciers are shedding icebergs more rapidly than nature can replenish the crumbling ice, doubling previous estimates of losses from the world's largest ice sheet over the past 25 years, a satellite analysis showed on Wednesday.
The net loss of the continent's ice sheet from calving alone in the past quarter-century spans nearly 37,000 sq km , an area almost the size of Switzerland, according to JPL scientist Chad Greene, the study's lead author. Ice shelves, permanent floating sheets of frozen freshwater attached to land, take thousands of years to form and act like buttresses holding back glaciers that would otherwise easily slide off into the ocean, causing seas to rise.
The losses measured from calving outpaced natural ice shelf replenishment so greatly that researchers found it unlikely Antarctica can return to pre-2000 glacier levels by the end of this century.
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