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Western Antarctica is melting slowly but surely. Right now, the most important thing to note is the slowly part.
97% of the Antarctica peninsular is still covered by ice, so it’s not that it’s all melting, it’s all gonna go away like that.
But little by little the 30 million cubic kilometers of ice that covered Antarctica is seeping into the ocean.
A small amount that ice melting is enough to make a significant contribution to the water going into the ocean which makes significant contribution to sea level rise.
NASA estimate that since 2004 Antarctica has been dripping 118 billion metric tons of ice to the ocean every year, much faster than scientists predicted.
And one the biggest challenges globally from all of this warming, this melt is that a lot of human population lives near sea level, a lot of big cities, a lot of agricultural land, a lot of vulnerable coastline.
Those changes directly tie the human impacted climate change are making the continent greener, quicker.
As we know, Antarctica has been the place that has registered the biggest increases in temperature. We’ve had approximately an increase of 3 degree in the last 50 years.
Researchers say the upshot of all this melting if we do not change things, it’s that sea levels could rise over 3 meters sometime the next 200 years.
Kevin Enochs, VOA News.
