article Once again, they're finding that ice loss is occurring faster than they had thought previously and that the estimates we heard last year were dependent on no ice melt in West Antarctica. Unfortunately: "Both Greenland and the West Antarctic ice sheet are huge bodies of ice and snow, which are sitting on land," said Rajendra Pachauri, chief of the IPCC, the United Nations' scientific advisory group. "If, through a process of melting, they collapse and are submerged in the sea, then we really are talking about sea-level rises of several meters." (A meter is about a yard.) Last year, the IPCC tentatively estimated that sea levels would rise by eight inches to two feet by the end of the century, assuming no melting in West Antarctica." "In all, snowfall and ice loss in East Antarctica have about equaled out over the past 10 years, leaving that part of the continent unchanged in terms of total ice. But in West Antarctica, the ice loss has increased by 59 percent over the past decade to about 132 billion metric tons a year, while the yearly loss along the peninsula has increased by 140 percent to 60 billion metric tons. Because the ice being lost is generally near the bottom of glaciers, the glacier moves faster into the water and thins further, as a result. Rignot said there has been evidence of ice loss going back as far as 40 years."
I'm not sure why this is making the papers as "new news". It has been known for some time that the West Antarctic has been melting due to the circumpolar current. The vast bulk of Antarctic Ice (something like 85% of the mass) lies in the East Antarctic Ice Sheet which is quite stable, cold, and has experienced a cooling trend for roughly the past 35-40 years. It seems a dubious proposition that this sort of ice loss would occur in the interior East Antarctic given that the ice sits on top of land: "Rignot and his team found that East Antarctica, which holds a majority of the continent's ice, has not experienced the same kind of loss -- probably because most of the ice sits atop land rather than below sea level, as in the west."
