Ice disappearing from the South Pole Faster

Layer of ice in East Antarctica, once seen mostly unaffected by global warming, has lost billions of tons of ice since 2006 and could push sea water level rise in the future, according to a new study.

The study, published in Nature Geoscience, Sunday, ice shows a smaller but less stable in West Antarctica is losing so much mass.

Scientists are worried that rising global temperatures could spark rapid division of West Antarctica, the frozen water to keep pushing the global ocean surface as high as five meters.

In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel for the UN climate change (IPCC) predicts sea levels will rise 18 to 59 centimeters in 2100 at the latest, but that estimate does not include the impact of ice began to crack in Greenland and Antarctica.

Today, many scientists say the same even if emissions of CO2, which traps heat, restricted, surface ocean water is more likely to rise about three feet, enough to make some small island states can not damage the habitable and fertile delta of the habitat of hundreds of millions of creatures .

More than 190 countries gathered in Copenhagen, in December, to design a climate change agreement to curb greenhouse gases and help poor countries cope with the consequences.

Lecturer University of Texas Jianli Chen and colleagues for almost seven years menganalisi ice ocean interactions in the Antarctic.

The data, which includes the period up to January 2009, collected by the two GRACE satellites, which detect the mass flow in the oceans and polar regions to measure changes in Earth's magnetic field.

In line with previous findings based on a variety of methods, they found that West Antarctica, on average, accumulating as much as 132 billion tons of ice into the sea every year, give or take 26 billion tons.

They also found that for the first time that East Antarctica, in the Eastern Hemisphere on the continent, is also losing mass, mostly in coastal areas, with a total area of about 57 billion tons per year.

The margin or error, they warned, almost as large as expected, which means the loss of ice can be a bit smaller than a few billion tons or more than 100 billion tons.

Setakat this, scientists have estimated that the East Antarctica "balanced", which means that accumulate as much mass and let it go, too, maybe even more.

"Thus, the rapid disappearance of added-ice in recent years throughout the continent can be known," concluded the authors reported the French news agency, AFP. "Antarctica may soon provide a much larger contribution to the increase in global sea levels."

One other study published last week in the journal Nature reported that the picture has changed for the Antarctic temperature during the warm, "inter-glacial" as has happened on average every 100,000 years.

During that period, which reached its peak 128,000 years ago, called Eemia periods, the temperature in the region, perhaps six degrees Celsius higher today, which is as much as 3 degrees Celsius above previous estimates, according to the study.

The findings showed that the region may be more sensitive than the scientists predicted the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere on average equal to the current level.

During the period Eemia, sea levels higher five-to-seven meters compared to today. (AntaraNews)