Originally published at Huffington Post by Jonathan Feldman, 8/21/14. Read Entire Article Now…
Greenland and Antarctica are home to the two largest ice sheets in the world, and a new report released Wednesday says that they are contributing to sea level rise twice as much as they were just five years ago.
Using the European Space Agency’s CryoSat 2 satellite, the Alfred Wegener Institute from Germany has found that western Antarctica and Greenland are losing massive amounts of ice.
“Combined, the two ice sheets are thinning at a rate of 500 cubic kilometres per year,” said glaciologist Dr. Angelika Humbert, one of the authors of the AWI study, in a press release. “That is the highest speed observed since altimetry satellite records began about 20 years ago.”
The report, published in the online magazine The Cryosphere, says the CryoSat 2 satellite measured over 200 million elevation data points in Antarctica and 14.3 million in Greenland to track the loss of ice mass over the last several years.
