The Technology That Revealed Just How Scarily Fast Antarctica Is Melting

Warming ocean waters have been destabilizing some of the massive ice shelves around Antarctica for years. “The system is no longer in equilibrium,” said Ala Khazendar of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the leader of the study published in the journal Nature Communications. As glaciers flow slowly off the edge of the continent and into the sea, they begin to float while still attached to the land in a zone scientists call the “grounding line.” It’s natural for seawater to melt the resulting ice shelves, “or pieces of the ice shelf detach from the front, forming what we know as icebergs,” said Khazendar.