Withdrawal of Greenland & Antarctica Going Fast

Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica three times faster than previously thought.

Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica were to melt with a faster acceleration than previously thought. This was revealed by the latest findings by the United States space agency NASA.

As quoted from Physorg sites, which use traditional research satellite imagery was found that the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheet thinned three times faster than the depletion that occurs in glaciers and icebergs.

Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctic mass loss of as much as 475 gigatons each year. One gigaton is equivalent to one billion metric tons. This volume is enough to raise world sea levels to average as high as 1.3 millimeters per year.

The rate of this melting so quickly than previously thought. "The layer of ice that dominated the sea level rise is not surprising, because they contain more ice than mountain glaciers," said Eric Rignot, a joint research between NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory with the University of California.

But surprisingly, he added, increasing the contribution of rising sea water by a layer of ice, has now occurred. "If this happens sea levels will rise significantly than previously projected by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change at 20,017."

The study itself, using two different measurement techniques, ie using data from interferometric synthetic aperture radar and a regional atmospheric climate model data from the Utrecht University, as well as observations from NASA satellite data / Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (Grace), Germany for eight years.