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A map of West Antarctica. The total volume of the entire Antarctic ice sheet is estimated at 26.92 million km 3 (6.46 million cu mi), [2] while the WAIS contains about 2.1 million km 3 (530,000 cu mi) in ice that is above the sea level, and ~1 million km 3 (240,000 cu mi) in ice that is below it. [20]
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 ...
West Antarctica, or Lesser Antarctica, one of the two major regions of Antarctica, is the part of that continent that lies within the Western Hemisphere, and includes the Antarctic Peninsula. It is separated from East Antarcticaby the Transantarctic Mountainsand is covered by the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. It lies between the Ross Sea(partly ...
The Ross Ice Shelf is the main outlet for several major glaciers draining the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which contains the equivalent of 5 m of sea level rise in its above-sea-level ice." The report added that observations of "iceberg calving" on the Ross Ice Shelf are, in their opinion, unrelated to its stability. [10]
The East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS) lies between 45° west and 168° east longitudinally. It was first formed around 34 million years ago, [77] and it is the largest ice sheet on the entire planet, with far greater volume than the Greenland ice sheet or the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), from which it is separated by the Transantarctic Mountains.
But the region is hugely significant: the Antarctic ice sheet already sheds an average of 150 billion metric tons of ice every year and, in its entirety, it holds enough water to raise global sea ...
It shows the glacier, the ice shelf on its eastern side, and the remains of the ice tongue in the west, now reduced to a "mélange" of icebergs which is much less effective at supporting the glacier and preventing calving events. [26] Thwaites Glacier is located at the northern edge of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, next to Pine Island Glacier.
This finding indicated the West Antarctic ice sheet had collapsed during this time — an event that would have inundated coastal regions but opened up ice-bound areas on the seafloor that the ...