A comprehensive study suggests the Antarctic ice sheet lost roughly three trillion tons of ice between 1992 and 2017.
The study, published today in Nature, found that annual ice loss in West Antarctica — the most vulnerable to warming temperatures — was almost three times higher than an earlier estimate in 2012, from 59 billion tons a year to 159 billion tons a year.
“This is a big increase in ice loss that needs to be understood and needs to be taken into consideration when we look to the future,” Andrew Shepherd, lead author and a professor of Earth Observation University of Leeds in the United Kingdom said.
The Antarctic ice sheet covers about 24 million square kilometres and holds about
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