New satellite pictures have revealed huge ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are shrinking faster than scientists predicted and in some areas are in “runaway melt mode”.

In an article by The Daily Mail it states that British scientists have calculated the changes in the height of the vulnerable but massive ice sheets and found them especially worse at their edges. In some parts of Antarctica, ice sheets have been losing 30 feet a year in thickness since 2003, according to the paper published in the journal Nature today.

Some of those areas are about a mile thick so still have plenty of ice to burn through. But the drop in thickness is speeding up. In parts of Antarctica, the yearly rate of thinning from 2003 to 2007 was 50% higher than it was from 1995 to 2003. The new measurements are based on 50 million laser readings from a NASA satellite.

The research found that 81 of the 111 Greenland glaciers surveyed are thinning at an accelerating self-feeding pace. The more the ice melts, the more water surrounds and eats away at the remaining ice.
‘To some extent it’s a runaway effect. The question is how far will it run?’ asked the study’s lead author Hamish Pritchard of the British Antarctic Survey. ‘It’s more widespread than we previously thought.’

The study does not answer the crucial question of how much this worsening melt will add to projections of sea level rise from man-made global warming. Some scientists have previously estimated that steady melting of the two ice sheets will add about 3 feet, maybe more, to sea levels by the end of the century. The ice sheets are so big, however, that it should take hundreds of years for them to disappear.

Worsening data keeps proving ‘that we’re underestimating’ how sensitive the ice sheets are to changes, Mr Pritchard warned.

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