Melting ice caps | World Tech Today

A gigantic glacier in Antarctica, the largest in the eastern part of the icy continent is melting at a never before rate, giving rise to fears of sea levels rising by another 10 feet during this year. The meltdown of the Totten Glacier, which has been caused by a warming ocean and globally rising temperatures, will have the most significant impact on the residents in the Northern hemisphere where, due to the earth’s gravitational force, the sea level rise will be more pronounced as compared to the rest of the world.

The concern has been raised by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, NASA and other research organizations who discovered two seafloor troughs which could allow warm ocean water to reach the base of Totten Glacier, already being referred to as East Antarctica’s most rapidly thinning glacier.

Newly discovered rivers under the Totten glacier are allowing in water from an increasingly warmer ocean, triggering this meltdown. As the sea water moves inland further, the glacier which is almost twice the size of Victoria will start melting at a faster rate, fear the Australian scientists.

Using ice-penetrating radar, aerial surveys have confirmed that a greater part of the ice on this glacier rests in deep valleys up to 1.5 kilometres below sea level, meaning the warming water can eat away at the polar ice cap, Australian Antarctic Division program leader Tas van Ommen said.

If the glacier in question was to melt down completely, it would cause sea levels across the world to rise by at least 11 feet. Till now, the western side of the continent, which is melting rapidly, had drawn more attention than the eastern side.

“The newly discovered troughs are deep enough to give the deep warm water access to the huge cavity under the glacier. The deeper of the two troughs extends from the ocean to the underside of Totten Glacier in an area not previously known to be floating,” say the scientists.

The result, published in the journal Nature Geoscience today, March 16th, has global implications because “the ice flowing through Totten Glacier alone is equivalent to the entire volume of the more widely studied West Antarctic Ice Sheet.”

A research team at the University of Arizona has pointed out that that the Scandinavian island of Iceland is rising as a result of global warming. After studying the relatively fast rising of Iceland crust over the last three decades, the researchers have raised concerns over the fact that it could be rising by as much as 1.4 inches a year and that it could lead to an increase in volcanic activity in the future.

“There have been a lot of studies that have shown that the uplift in Iceland is primarily due to ice loss,” said lead author Kathleen Compton, an Arizona PhD student, adding that her study was the first to show accelerated sea level rise influences the land.

The research draws attention towards the rising of the vast ice sheets with the onset of global warming nearly three decades back. Kathleen says the team first began using GPS technology similar to what you’d find in a car to measure uplift in 2006.

“We used 62 GPS stations located all across the island of Iceland, and looked at how fast those GPS stations were moving upward through time,” Compton told FoxNews.com.

What really surprised researchers was the speed at which some sites in Iceland were rising.

“They’re not only moving upward very rapidly in the central and southern part of the island, but they’re speeding up over time- moving faster and faster each year.”

Some sites are rising as much as 1.4 inches a year. Researchers are worried that the rebound of the crust could mean an increase in the frequency of volcanic eruptions similar to the 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajökull which had disrupted air travel over the European continent on an unprecedented scale.

Shortly afterwards, another Icelandic volcano Bardarbunga had began erupting in August 2014 and it hasn’t stopped since.

“I anticipate, given the 2014 Bardarbunga eruption, that there will be continued close monitoring of activity in Iceland- at least for the next five years,” said co-author Richard Bennett, an associate professor of geosciences at the University of Arizona to FoxNews.

The team’s study was financed by the National Science Foundation and the Icelandic Center for Research and the findings were published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Warming oceans beginning to affect ice sheets in East Antarctica as well

Land in Iceland rising by 1.4 inches a year due to global warming