Thinning Ice In Antarctica And Rising Sea Levels Pose Threat To World

Imagine you are a 100 years older. When you look back, you would remember 2014 as the year we first understood that we have destabilised the great ice sheet of West Antarctica, and started more than 3m of sea level rise, according to washingtonpost.

This year, 2015, could be a year of the "double whammy", learning the same facts about one gigantic glacier in East Antarctica, which could start the same amount of sea level rise again.

As sea levels are expected to rise by a staggering 6.8m within a century, the world is on the brink of a great threat, according to news.

These research facts about East Antarctica have been published in a daily, Nature Geoscience, by a team of scientists from the United States, Britain, France and Australia.

Even as they flew over the Totten Glacier of east Antarctica, which is worryingly the "fastest-thinning sector of the world's largest ice sheet", the team also took some measure of trying to find out why the retreat took place. Unfortunately, Totten too is losing ice as warm ocean water is flowing underneath.

"The idea of warm ocean water eroding the ice in west Antarctica, what we're finding is that may well be applicable in east Antarctica as well," says Martin Siegert, a co-author of the study.

While the floating ice shelf of the Totten Glacier is spread over 145 kms by 35 kms, the glacier has a "vast catchment" of ice, which could produce a sea level rise of over 3ms. This measure can compared to the influence of a loss from the West Antarctica ice sheet.

This is "a conservative lower limit", says lead study author Jamin Greenbaum, at the University of Texas at Austin.

The Totten Glacier , like the west Antarctic glaciers, have ice shelves sloping out from the vast sheet of ice on land and extending into the water. If the ocean underneath these ice shelves warm up, then they lose ice quickly, which will permit the ice sheet behind them to flow faster into the sea.

With the help of gravitational instruments, radar and laser altimetry to understand the effects underneath the glacier, whose ice shelves are more than 490ms thick, as well as radar, they also measured the thickness of the ice. When they calculated the earth's gravitational pull on the plane, the scientists could understand how much below the ice it is. By also calculating the pull of the Earth's gravity on the plane, the scientists could find out how far below the ice the seafloor was.

The scientists discovered two undersea troughs below the ice shelf, which permitted more water to flow below the floating ice. These "subsea valleys," according to the researchers, point to the glacier's retreat, which would also permit deep waters to get belowthe ice shelf and increase its melting.

The warm water and the melting ice "support the idea that the behaviour of Totten Glacier is an east Antarctic analogue to ocean-driven retreat under way in the west Antarctic ice sheet".

If Antarctica loses ice it will cause sea levels to rise around the globe. Being so massive, the continent would pull the ocean towards it, but if it loses ice, the gravitational pull will relax, and the ocean will move towards the Northern Hemisphere, leading to an increase in the sea levels.