Antarctica’s glaciers are on the run: Landsat reveals accelerating melt

ANTARCTICA is home to 90 per cent of the world’s ice.

And much of it is on the move.

NASA scientists have released data from satellites watching the southern continent.

The show its massive glaciers are accelerating.

Findings published in the journal Cryosphere reveal they are slipping ever faster into the Southern Ocean. There, as icebergs, they melt away.

Calculations based on seven years of Landsat satellite images reveal 1,929 gigatons of ice broke away in 2015.

That’s up 36 gigatons from the previous measurement in 2008.

Freshly developed software has been sifting through hundreds of thousands of satellite photos, designed to track the movement of as many identifiable features as possible.

Unlike previous studies, this tracks ice over the entire continent.

It reveals an acceleration of melting on its southwestern side.

In particular, the Getz ice shelf is recording among the most significant movement.

The Thwaites and Pine Island glaciers are still accelerating, as determined by earlier studies, but at a gradually decreasing rate.


Antarctica’s eastern shores have in the past received much less attention. The new data shows a mostly steady rate of slippage into the ocean.

“We’ll be able to use this information to target field campaigns, and understand the processes causing these changes,” the study’s lead author Dr Alex Gardner says. “Over the next decade, all this is going to lead to rapid improvement in our knowledge of how ice sheets respond to changes in ocean and atmospheric conditions, knowledge that will ultimately help to inform projections of sea level change.”