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Receding. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) is the segment of the continental ice sheet that covers West Antarctica, the portion of Antarctica on the side of the Transantarctic Mountains that lies in the Western Hemisphere. It is classified as a marine-based ice sheet, meaning that its bed lies well below sea level and its edges flow into ...
The Antarctic ice sheet is a continental glacier covering 98% of the Antarctic continent, with an area of 14 million square kilometres (5.4 million square miles) and an average thickness of over 2 kilometres (1.2 mi). It is the largest of Earth's two current ice sheets, containing 26.5 million cubic kilometres (6,400,000 cubic miles) of ice ...
The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is particularly vulnerable to climate change, because the land under it is below sea level and slopes downward. When warm water gets underneath, it can melt very fast.
The West Antarctic ice sheet is likely to melt completely, [16] [17] [18] unless temperatures are reduced by 2 °C (3.6 °F) below the levels of the year 2020. [19] The loss of this ice sheet would take between 2,000 and 13,000 years, [20] [21] although several centuries of high emissions could shorten this timeframe to 500 years. [22]
The Antarctic ice sheet is melting in a new, ... Recent research from West Antarctica found melting at the base of glaciers was actually lower than expected, ...
Another study published in Science Advances, also last month, reported that nearly 50 Antarctic ice shelves have shrunk by at least 30% since 1997 and 28 of those have lost more than half their ...
The tipping points in the cryosphere include: Greenland ice sheet disintegration, West Antarctic ice sheet disintegration, East Antarctic ice sheet disintegration, arctic sea ice decline, retreat of mountain glaciers, permafrost thaw. The tipping points for ocean current changes include the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC ...
The Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers are two of Antarctica's five largest ice streams.Scientists have found that the flow of these ice streams has accelerated in recent years, and suggested that if they were to melt, global sea levels would rise by 1 to 2 m (3 ft 3 in to 6 ft 7 in), destabilising the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet and perhaps sections of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet.