Antarctica's most important glaciers depleting faster than ever: Study

The European Space Agency has revealed that two of the mainglaciers in Antarctica,Pine Island and Thwaites Glaciers, are fracturing faster than ever before.

The glaciers are atAmundsen Sea Embayment and are one of the most important glaciers of the continent.

If these glaciers completely melt, it could lead to nearly3.3 feet rise in the global sea levels. Asof now, their melting has resulted in nearly 5 per cent ofglobal sea level rise.

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The claim has been made after observing satellite images. "'To reveal what’s really going on at Pine Island and Thwaites, we dug into imaging data from a number of different satellites,' said paper author and geoscientist Stef Lhermitte of the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.

He researchers have found "structural damage at the "shear margins" of the glaciers’ ice shelves, where the ice transitions from fast- to slow-moving — large crevasses, rifts and open fractures that indicate that the ice shelves are slowly tearing apart."

"Currently, the ice shelves are a little like a slow car in traffic — they force anything behind them to slow down. Once they’re removed, ice sitting further inland will be able to speed up, which in turn will cause sea levels to rise even faster."

The satellite data collected by various agencies asEuropean Space Agency's CryoSat and Copernicus Sentinel-1, as well as the NASA/USGS Landsat program and the Japanese ASTER instrument aboard NASA’s Terra satellite, reveals that thedeterioration has increased majorly in the last two decades as crevasses were not seen in images of the ice taken back in 1997, and were still less widespread in 2016.

To understand the impact of the damaged margins, the researchers observed the change in the topography of the glaciers and assessed the speed at which the ice had been moving.

"This fracturing appears to kick off a feedback process — it preconditions the ice shelves to disintegrate,' said paper author Thomas Nagler of Environmental Earth Observation Information Technology (ENVEO) in Innsbruck, Austria.

"As the glaciers fracture at their weak points this damage speeds up, spreads, and weakens more of the ice shelves, causing further deterioration — and making it more likely that the shelves will start crumbling apart even faster," he continued.

Through this research, the scientists are hoping the world will realise how quickly the damage is occurring in the nature, and reveal the vulnerability of glaciers to global warming.

"The results from this study highlight a pressing need to include such feedback processes in model projections of ice shelf retreat, ice sheet mass loss and sea level change,' said European Space Agency CryoSat Mission Scientist, Mark Drinkwater.

"We know that a significant amount of glacial ice in West Antarctica is currently being affected by climate change — in fact, a recent study found 24 per cent of this ice to be rapidly thinning and unstable."

"These new results underline just how quickly this damage is occurring, and reveal that Pine Island and Thwaites Glaciers are more vulnerable than ever before."

The study has been published in theProceedings of the National Academy of Science.