Satellite photos show the area had been shrinking rapidly the last couple of years, and now scientists wonder if they have been overestimating East Antarctica’s stability and resistance to global warming that has been melting ice rapidly on the smaller western side and the vulnerable peninsula.
The ice shelf, about 460 square miles wide holding in the Conger and Glenzer glaciers from the warmer water, collapsed between March 14 and 16, said ice scientist Catherine Walker of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.
And that’s important because if the water frozen in East Antarctica melted — and that’s a millennia-long process if not longer — it would raise seas across the globe more than 160 feet .
“East Antarctica is starting to change.
Scientists had been seeing this particular ice shelf — closest to Australia — shrink a bit since the 1970s, Neff said.
Last week, what’s called an atmospheric river dumped a lot of warm air — and even rain instead of snow — on parts of East Antarctica, getting temperatures so far above normal that scientists have spent the last week discussing it.