Ice loss from Antarctica is accelerating, warns study

The West Antarctica ice sheet lost some 132 billion tonnes, while the Antarctic Peninsula, the tongue of land that juts up towards South America, lost around 60 million tonnes.

But there was a 8220;near-zero8221; loss in East Antarctica, the world8217;s biggest icesheet, the paper says.

Investigators from five countries, led by Eric Rignot of NASA8217;s fabled Jet Propulsion Laboratory JPL, used interferometry radar from four satellites to build a picture of the periphery of Antarctica.

They sought to measure the velocities of glaciers that shift ice to the coast from the massive sheets that cover Antarctica8217;s bedrock.

They built up a picture of around 85 per cent of Antarctica8217;s coastline thanks to the data supplied by the European Space Agency8217;s two Earth Remoting Sensing ERS satellites, the Canadian Radarsat-1 and Japan8217;s Advanced Land Observing satellites.

8220;Over the time period of our survey, the ice sheet as a whole was certainly losing mass, and the mass loss increased by 75 per cent in 10 years,8221; according to the study, published online by the specialist journal Nature Geoscience.

8220;Most of the mass loss is from the Pine Island Bay sector of West Antarctica and the northern tip of the Peninsula, where it is driven by ongoing, pronounced glacier acceleration.