Story by Reuters

https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/11/world/antarctica-ice-sheet-crumbling-climate-intl/index.html

Updated 6:07 AM ET, Thu August 11, 2022

Thinning and calving have reduced the mass of Antarctica’s ice shelves by 12 trillion tons since 1997, an analysis found.

Los AngelesAntarctica’s coastal glaciers are shedding icebergs more rapidly than nature can replenish the crumbling ice, doubling previous estimates of losses from the world’s largest ice sheet over the past 25 years, a satellite analysis showed on Wednesday.

The first-of-its-kind study, led by researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) near Los Angeles and published in the journal Nature, raises new concern about how fast climate change is weakening Antarctica’s floating ice shelves and accelerating the rise of global sea levels.

The study’s key finding was that the net loss of Antarctic ice from coastal glacier chunks “calving” off into the ocean is nearly as great as the net amount of ice that scientists already knew was being…