A team of scientists from the University of California, Irvine has found evidence of significant mass loss in East Antarctica’s Totten and Moscow University glaciers, which, if they fully collapsed, could add 5 meters (16.4 feet) to the global sea level.
A team of scientists from the University of California, Irvine has found evidence of significant mass loss in East Antarctica’s Totten and Moscow University glaciers, which, if they fully collapsed, could add 5 meters (16.4 feet) to the global sea level.
In a paper published this week in the American Geophysical Union journal Geophysical Research Letters, the glaciologists estimate that between April 2002 and September 2016, the two glaciers lost about 18.5 billion tons of ice per year – equivalent to 0.7 millimeters (0.03 inches) of global sea level rise over the analyzed time period.
UCI’s researchers discovered this by applying a locally optimized technique to data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery & Climate Experiment satellite mission, combined with mass balance approximations from regional atmospheric climate models and ice discharge measurements by NASA’s Operation IceBridgeand Measures projects.
“For this research, we used an improved methodology with GRACE data to retrieve the mass loss in an area undergoing rapid change,” said lead author Yara Mohajerani, a graduate student in UCI’s Department of Earth System Science. “By overlaying these data with independent measurements, we improve our confidence in the results and the conclusion that Totten and Moscow University are imperiled.”
Read more at University of California – Irvine
Image: In this WorldView-2 satellite image of Totten Glacier’s front – acquired on Oct. 11, 2015 – ice flows from left to right. The heavily crevassed surface of the floating part of Totten is visible on the left, with larger undulations in topography associated with bottom crevasses. The dark area in front of the glacier is open water, and on the right is thin and pack sea ice. CREDIT: DigitalGlobe Inc.
