Scientists just found yet another reason to worry about Antarctica's ice

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http://www.ocregister.com/articles/ice-703354-antarctica-shelf.html

In the past two years, major scientific developments have suggested that all of our eyes should be on a place that only a tiny fraction of us will ever visit - Antarctica, the frozen South Pole continent that’s larger than the continental United States and contains the majority of the planet’s land-based ice.

In 2014, scientists revealed that key parts of remote West Antarctica, may have been destabilized by warm ocean waters reaching the bases of vast submarine glaciers and melting them from below. West Antarctica, as a whole, contains nearly 11 feet of potential sea level rise. And last year, research hinted that a similar vulnerability may exist for the truly gigantic Totten Glacier of East Antarctica.

Now, in a study in Nature Climate Change, researchers provide a new way of looking at how vulnerable Antarctica’s ice is - and the approach, unfortunately, largely reinforces the conclusions of the prior studies.

To understand the new research, you first have to understand a truly astonishing feature of Antarctica that is virtually without rival anywhere else - it is ringed with gigantic ice shelves. These are sometimes country-sized sheets of ice extending out over the surface of the ocean and floating on top of it.

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