I'm gonna take it slow here, the pace is about 1 foot an hour, at that rate the PIG could sneak right up on ya and you would never even know it until it was too late.
At that pace, 2 miles a year, the PIG represents a 47 billion ton per anum leak of grounded Antarctic Ice melting under the Mile thick ice caps and flowing out from the land into the sea.
A few people have spent the last half decade trying to get us to pay attention, identifying funding for things like submersibles with cameras to get a better picture of the PIG's weak underbelly. In 2010 we are supposed to finally get a look.
Bindschadler: That portion of West Antarctica, that third that flows northward primarily through those two glaciers, has the potential to raise sea level 1 ½ meters. That’s sort of an upper bound, a worst case. But the time scale is what really matters. Some say that we won’t see these ice shelves disappear in our lifetime — I’m not so sure. I think we might well.
e360: Are you kidding?
Bindschadler: No, no at all.
Climate Change: Pine Island Glacier is now allowing the Antarctic Ice Cap to melt at the same rate as Greenlands ice.
The "suprising non linear acceleration of Antarctica's ice melt since 2005 has caught scientists by suprise.
The same goes for the speed-up in the melting of Greenland’s ice sheet, bleakly described by Dr. Wahleed Abdalati, a scientist with the University of Colorado who has spent much of his career tracking this shrinkage with NASA satellites.
Judging from diagrams Abdalati flashed on a screen, ice from its huge ice cap appears flows out of Greenland’s glaciers the way water flows out of a bathtub after the plug is pulled.
Ilulissat’s glacier has lost twice as much ice in the past nine years as during the previous 100 years — and when the ice hits warmer water, it melts many times faster than before — a phenomenon Abdalati said he finds astonishing, fascinating and depressing.
Not a pretty picture
Most people have accepted the artic is getting warmer and losing its sea ice and think perhaps this will affect their grandchilren unless we get around to doing something pretty soon. Scientists are now starting to inform us that it may not be our granchildren who are going to be the first to experience cities around the world flooded by rising sea levels.
It all depends on how rapid the acceleration is
"In the space of just two seasons, the ice was moving 6.4 per cent faster, which is exceptional," says Dr Julian Scott of the BAS, who placed GPS trackers on the ice to measure its movement.
Some have wondered whether the cause might be vulcanism under the ice sheet
There are some concerns about how this much sea level rise might affect the US.
In East Antarctica ice has been melting faster since 2006
In the study published in Nature's Geoscience journal, scientists estimated that East Antarctica has been losing ice mass at an average rate of 5 to 109 gigatonnes per year from April 2002 to January 2009, but the rate speeded up from 2006.
The melt rate after 2006 could be even higher, the scientists said.
"The key result is that appear to start seeing a large amount of ice loss in East Antarctica, mostly in the long coastal regions (in Wilkes Land and Victoria Land), since 2006," Jianli Chen at the university's center for space research and one of the study's authors, told Reuters.
"This, if confirmed, could indicate a state change of East Antarctica, which could pose a large impact on global sea levels in the future," Chen said.