Where sea ice does melt away completely in the Antarctic summer, the ice’s absence can have cascading effects. Ice sheets are losing mass. The West Antarctic ice sheet was stable in 1992 but up to a quarter of its expanse is now thinning. The Antarctic ice sheet is, on average, about two kilometers thick, but in some places the bedrock is almost five kilometers below the surface of this huge polar ice cap. This system drains 10% of the Antarctic ice sheet. As temperatures rise due to climate change, the melting of polar ice sheets is accelerating. For example, sea ice retreat in the Weddell Sea along the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula probably contributed to Larsen Ice … Antarctic snowfall has accumulated over millions of years to build the world’s biggest ice sheet, essentially a massive glacier flowing in all directions. Shown below are up-to-date satellite observations of the sea ice covers of both the Arctic and the Antarctic, along with comparisons with the historical satellite record of more than 37 years. A major focus of Australia’s ice sheet research has been in the Lambert Glacier basin near the Prince Charles Mountains. Because it’s a group of islands, much of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS, in jargon) is actually sitting on the floor of the Southern Ocean, not on dry land. More than 100 metres of ice thickness has been lost in the worst-hit places. Such a retreat, once started, could lead to the collapse of the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which contains enough ice to raise global sea level by over three metres. The Antarctic Ice Sheet is an important indicator of climate change and driver of sea-level rise. The Antarctic Ice Sheet extends over nearly 5.4 million square miles, and it’s about 13,000 feet thick at its summit, over the East Antarctic … (Meanwhile, the Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass.) Pine Island is the largest of these islands and the largest ice stream in West Antarctica is called Pine Island Glacier. Reconstructing the dynamic response of the Antarctic ice sheets to warming during the Last Glacial Termination (LGT; 18,000–11,650 yrs ago) allows us to disentangle ice … In contrast, in the Antarctic the sea ice coverage has been increasing although at a lesser rate than the decreases in the Arctic. Parts of it are more than 1.7 kilometers (1 mile) below sea level. Paleoclimatology is the study of the Earth’s atmosphere in prehistoric times. The Lambert Glacier is the world’s largest glacier, at about 40 km wide and 400 km long. 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