Another study in Nature on Wednesday found that East Antarctic ice sheet didn't retreat significantly 2 million to 5 million years ago when heat-trapping carbon dioxide levels were similar to what they are now. This is largely, say scientists, because the floating ice platforms sitting in front of some glaciers have collapsed, allowing the ice behind to flow faster. "The last time we looked at the polar ice sheets, Greenland was the dominant contributor. It's possible that Antarctica alone can add about half a foot (16 centimeters) to sea level rise by the end of the century, Shepherd said. Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Andrew Shepherd: "The study incorporates 24 independent satellite assessments" 
 
 Space agencies have been flying satellites over Antarctica since the early 1990s. In total, Antarctica has shed some 2.7 trillion tonnes of ice since 1992, corresponding to an increase in global sea level of more than 7.5mm. The latest figures show East Antarctica is losing relatively little ice a year — about 31 tons (28 metric tons) — since 2012. On the Antarctic Peninsula, the finger of land that points up to South America, the losses have risen from seven billion to 33 billion tonnes annually. In West Antarctica, which is dominated by those marine-terminating glaciers, the assessed losses have climbed from 53 billion to 159 billion tonnes per year over the full period from 1992 to 2017. This is pushing up global sea levels by 0.6mm annually - a three-fold increase since 2012 when the last such assessment was undertaken. "Friction on the bottom of the ice, which was floating but has now grounded again, slows everything and changes the whole dynamic upstream. More than 70 percent of the recent melt is in West Antarctica. All that water made global oceans rise about three-tenths of an inch (7.6 millimeters). Seas also rise from melting land glaciers elsewhere, Greenland's dwindling ice sheet and the fact that warmer water expands. "There are no other plausible signals to be driving this other than climate change." From 1992 to 2011, Antarctica lost nearly 84 billion tons of ice a year (76 billion metric tons). That doesn't mean we should be desperate," said University of California Irvine's Isabella Velicogna, one of 88 co-authors.
– Scientists monitoring ice loss in Antarctica have chilling news: The melting rate has accelerated alarmingly and the ice sheet is now shedding more than 200 billion tons a year, according to a study involving 88 scientists published in the journal Nature. The researchers say the rate of ice loss has tripled over the last decade and the melting ice sheets are now pushing up sea levels around the world by around a half-millimeter every year, reports the BBC. Antarctica was losing around 49 billion tons of ice a year in the mid-1990s, which went up to an average 219 billion tons a year between 2012 and 2017, the study found. The researchers, who used satellite data going back more than 25 years, say most of the melting ice comes from the West Antarctic sheet, parts of which are in a "state of collapse"—and modest ice growth in the East Antarctic is nowhere near enough to offset it. "The increasing mass loss that they’re finding is really worrying, particularly looking at the West Antarctic, the area that’s changing most rapidly," University of Waterloo glaciologist Christine Dow tells the Washington Post. "And it’s the area that we’re most worried about, because it’s below sea level." Antarctica has lost a total of around 3 trillion tons of ice since 1992 and will be contributing more and more to sea level rise if the current trend continues, warn researchers, who say climate change is the only plausible explanation for the ice loss. "I think we should be worried. That doesn't mean we should be desperate," says study co-author Isabella Velicogna of the University of California Irvine, per the AP. "Things are happening. They are happening faster than we expected."