The Antarctica peninsula is a thin strip of land that breaks away from the rest of the continent about 1,000 kilometers to the extreme tip of South Americawith mountains that reach even 2,800 meters high.
Ice calving in Antarctica
Despite the fact that the peninsula is home to several research bases along the coasts, the field analysis of the glaciers more interiors were so far very limited by the imperfect conformation of the territorybut there are new data available from satellites.
When analyzing some 10 thousand satellite imagesin particular those of radar taken by the Sentinel-1 satellites, the researchers were able to estimate the speed of sliding towards the sea of the glaciers of the entire peninsula.
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The scientists estimated that between 1992 and 2017 the dissolution of the ice contributed to the rise of the seas in 7.6 millimeters.
Thus it arose that ice slides 22% faster during the hot seasondue both to the higher temperatures of the sea and to the melting of the snow, which forms a kind of liquid cushion under the glacier that makes it slide faster.
Global warming
“One of the important results of this study is that it reveals how sensitive Antarctic glaciers are to the environment.”emphasized international study first author Ben Wallis.
“We have known for a long time that glaciers in greenland they have a seasonal behaviorbut only now, with data from satellites, have we verified similar behavior in Antarctica,” Wallis added.
Source: Ambito
