Antarctica's Ice Is Melting Dangerously Fast, India Will Drown By 2 Metre Rise In Water By 2100

An international team of scientists released a telling report on the rate at which Antarctica -- earth's only continent that's completely covered by ice -- is losing its ice cover, thanks to unprecedented level of global warming caused by human activity.

And the news is anything but good. In fact, it's downright scary and concerns all of us, because Antarctica's ice melt can cause a catastrophic rise in global sea levels.

reuters

According to the scientific journal, Nature, a team of 84 researchers from 42 global organizations presented their findings of study on Antarctica's ice melt between 2012 and 2017.

The report claims that just in the last five years, Antarctica's ice sheet has shrunk and it has lost 219 billion tons of ice every single year from 2012 to 2017, which amounts to triple the rate of ice melt before 2012.

According to Reuters, the frozen continent lost almost three trillion tonnes of ice in the last 25 years.

Not just that, but between 1992 and 2017, Antarctica's ice loss has directly resulted to about 1 centimetre rise in global sea level -- forty percent of that overall sea level rise happened in just the last five years between 2012 and 2017.

"The sharp increase ... is a big surprise," professor Andrew Shepherd of the University of Leeds and a leader of the report, told Reuters.

According to Professor Shepherd, Antarctica could raise world sea levels by at least 15 cm by 2100, well above most past estimates, if we don't do something to reduce the pace of global warming and rising sea temperatures.

Why should we care about Antarctica's accelerated rate of melting ice? Because Antarctica has enough ice to raise global sea levels by 58 meters or 190 ft, a scenario that will drown entire cities and wipe off coastal population belts from around the world.

A worry trend indeed. A life-threatening scenario we have to fix soon, before it's too late.