"The fact that so many glaciers in such a large region suddenly started to lose ice came as a surprise to us. It shows a very fast response of the ice sheet: in just a few years the dynamic regime completely shifted," said lead author Dr. Bert Wouters.
Wouters and his team have ruled out air temperature or snowfall for the abrupt change. They westerly winds made vigorous due to global warming, is driving warm ocean waters towards glaciers.
"It appears that sometime around 2009, the ice shelf thinning and the subsurface melting of the glaciers passed a critical threshold which triggered the sudden ice loss. However, compared to other regions in Antarctica, the Southern Peninsula is rather understudied, exactly because it did not show any changes in the past, ironically," Dr. Wouters said.
The ice loss has been so significant that it causes small changes to Earth`s gravity field which can be detected by some satellites.
The study has been published in the journal Science.
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