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A research published in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the result of the longest evaluation of the history of the ice masses of Antarctica, shows that, compared to 40 years ago, this territory melts six times more years.
Global warming is causing Antarctic ice to melt faster than ever. Compared to what happened four decades ago, today this phenomenon occurs six times more in the year causing something that has the scientific community concerned: the rising sea level.
The conclusion belongs to a study that was just published in the American journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). In it, the researchers, led by Eric Rignot, say that the melting of the Antarctic ice has already generated a sea level increase of 1.4 cm between 1979 and 2017.
According to Rignot, lead author of the study and president of Earth System Science at the University of California, Irvine, it is expected that the rate of this dissolution will lead to a catastrophic rise in sea levels over the next few years. "If the ice of Antarctica will continue to melt, we will have an increase of several meters of sea level over the next few centuries," he says.
In fact, a growth of 1.8 meters by 2100, as some scientists predict, could lead to the flooding of several coastal cities where millions of people live.
To reach these conclusions, the researchers carried out the longest evaluation of the history of the Antarctic ice masses in 18 geographical regions. The information was obtained through high resolution aerial photographs taken by NASA aircraft, as well as satellites from various space agencies.
The scientists found that between 1979 and 1990, Antarctica lost an average of 40,000 million tons of ice in the year. Between 2009 and 2017, the loss of ice masses has increased more than six times, to 252,000 million in the year.
For the authors it was even more worrying that even some areas considered "stable and immune to change" in Eastern Antarctica were suffering from thawing.
"The Wilkes Land sector in Eastern Antarctica has always been an important player in the mass loss of ice, even in the 80s," he demonstrated our research, "says Rignot. "This region is probably more sensitive to climate change than previously thought and it is important to know why it contains more ice than West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula combined".
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