Antarctica is covered almost completely in a thick layer of ice, comprised of about 90 percent of all the ice in the entire world, 70 percent of the Earth¡¯s fresh water.
And it¡¯s melting away.
NASA scientists have warned that the Southern continent is on the verge of wasting away entirely. Using a new computer-vision technique, the space agency has been able to create a map of just how fast the southern ice shelf is melting, and it¡¯s not a pretty picture.
In 2015, Antarctica let loose about 1929 gigatons of ice, 36 gigatons more than in 2008. To put that into perspective, a Boeing 747 weighs about 300 metric tonnes. That means the ice shelf lost hundreds of millions of 747¡¯s worth of ice in a year.
But it¡¯s not just that we won¡¯t have a giant block of ice in the South anymore, the worry is about what happens to all that melted ice. NASA shows that ice is floating away into warmer waters where it will fully melt, further accelerating the rise in sea levels threatening coastal areas in the next few years.
NASA built the maps by having an AI analyse hundreds of thousands of satellite images for changes in glacier movement between 2013 and 2015. They were then able to compare it to older data to give the current measurements.
¡°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,¡± the study¡¯s lead author and JPL Earth scientist Alex Gardner, PhD, said in a statement.