Ocean warming is causing massive ice sheet loss in Greenland and Antarctica, NASA study shows

https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/01/us/nasa-ice-sheet-loss-climate-change-trnd/index.html

By Mallika Kallingal, CNN
Updated 1:43 PM ET, Fri May 1, 2020

He told NASA, "We now have a 16-year span between ICESat and ICESat-2 and can be much more confident that the changes we're seeing in the ice have to do with the long-term changes in the climate."

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He told NASA, "We now have a 16-year span between ICESat and ICESat-2 and can be much more confident that the changes we're seeing in the ice have to do with the long-term changes in the climate."

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The NASA study also looked at ice shelves: the floating masses of ice at the downstream end of glaciers. The researchers found ice shelves are losing mass in West Antarctica, where many of the continent's fastest-moving glaciers are located as well, according to NASA.

NASA explains that ice that melts from ice shelves doesn't raise sea levels, since it's already floating -- just like an ice cube already in a full cup of water doesn't overflow the glass when it melts. But the ice shelves provide stability for the glaciers and ice sheets behind them.

"It's like an architectural buttress that holds up a cathedral," says Helen Amanda Fricker, a glaciologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego, and co-author of the Science paper.

She told NASA, "The ice shelves hold the ice sheet up. If you take away the ice shelves, or even if you thin them, you're reducing that buttressing force, so the grounded ice can flow faster."
This study was conducted over 16 years and published online in Science April 30.