East Antarctic ice began to melt faster in 2006 -study

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 [we] 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 centre 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.