An international group of scientists found that the rate of melting of the Antarctic ice sheets accelerated threefold in the last five years.

At the same time, the contribution of Antarctica to sea-level rise is still small: only 7.6 millimeters in the period from 1992 to 2017, writes New Scientist.

"There has been a sharp increase, with almost half of the losses occurring in the last five years. The outlook for the future is different from what we assumed earlier, "says Andrew Shepherd of the University of Leeds in the UK, one of the 84 scientists who participated in the study.

Until 2012, ice loss in Antarctica was only 0.2 mm per year to sea level and, apparently, did not increase. "We could not detect any acceleration," says Shepherd. But since 2012, this figure has tripled to 0.6 mm per year.

According to the authors of the research, until 2012, the reduction in the amount of ice in the Antarctic was at a level of 76 billion tons per year, but since then this figure has risen to the level of 219 billion tons per year.

Computer simulation in 2016 showed that only one Antarctica can lose enough ice by 2100 to raise the sea level by 2 meters. This means that the total sea level can rise more than 3 meters by 2100. It will continue to grow long after this.

Although many glaciologists are skeptical of the study of 2016, no one knows for sure how fast the seas will grow.

The problem is that computer models are, in fact, the only way to predict how much the Antarctic ice will lose. And the only way to test these models is to compare their predictions with what actually happens.

The most important question is whether the increase in ice loss in the Antarctic is a temporary phenomenon or the rate of melting of ice will continue to grow nonlinearly: it will quickly increase to several millimeters per year, then to several centimeters per year and so on.

Source: HB.