Sascha is a U.K.-based trainee staff writer at Live Science. She holds a bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Southampton in England and a master’s degree in science communication from Imperial College London. Her work has appeared in The Guardian and the health website Zoe.
The rate at which the West Antarctic ice sheet is melting will accelerate over the coming decades and is now an"unavoidable" consequence of climate change, a new study finds.
"It looks like we've lost control of melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet," study lead author Kaitlin Naughten, a researcher at the British Antarctic Survey who specializes in ocean and ice modeling, said in a statement."If we wanted to preserve it in its historical state, we would have needed action on climate change decades ago."
The three scenarios predicting the lowest rise in mean global temperature — 1.5 C above preindustrial levels, 2 C above preindustrial levels, and between 2 and 3 C above preindustrial levels — had nearly identical effects on the rate of melting in the Amundsen Sea, according to the statement.
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