The region is home to the so-called "doomsday glacier". The author of the study said "It appears that we may have lost control."
may now be unavoidable as human-caused global warming accelerates, with potentially devastating implications for sea level rise around the world, new research has found.
The researchers looked at "basal melting", when warm ocean currents melt the ice from beneath. They analysed the rate of ocean warming and ice shelf melting under different climate change scenarios. These ranged from the ambitious, where the world manages to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, to the worst-case, where humans burn large amounts of planet-heating fossil fuels.
West Antarctica is already the continent's largest contributor to global sea level rise and has enough ice to raise sea levels by an average of 5.3 metres. Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the University of Colorado Boulder who was not involved with the study, said the findings were "sobering". They build on existing research that painted an alarming picture of what was happening to the planet's southernmost continent, he told CNN.
Some scientists sounded a note of caution about the study. Tiago Segabinazzi Dotto, senior research scientist at the National Oceanography Centre in the UK, said it should be "treated carefully" as it was based on a single model. "The question of doom and gloom is something I've spent a lot of time thinking about with this study, because how do you tell such a bad news story?" Naughten said.
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