Ecologist - A dramatic shift has taken place in the glaciers of the southern Antarctic peninsula, writes Bert Wouters. Six years ago these previously stable bodies suddenly stated shedding 60 cubic kilometres of ice per year into the ocean... The fact that so many glaciers in such a large region suddenly started to lose ice came as a surprise. It shows a very fast response of the ice sheet: in just a few years everything changed....
Using satellite elevation measurements, we found the Southern Antarctic Peninsula showed no signs of change up to 2009. Around that year, multiple glaciers along a vast 750km coastline suddenly started to shed ice into the ocean at a nearly constant rate of 60 cubic km, or about 55 trillion litres of water, each year. That's enough water to fill 350,000 Empire State Buildings over the past five years.
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