What the Melting of Antarctic Ice Shelves Means for the Planet – Inside Climate News
Antarctica’s ice shelves are the gatekeepers between the continent’s glaciers and the open ocean. As the planet warms, these shelves shrink, exposing more and more ice, which leads to more melting. This frozen continent rests under a massive ice sheet averaging more than a mile thick. But a recent study in Science Advances found that Antarctica had 68 ice shelves that shrunk significantly between 1997 and 2021, adding up to about 8.3 trillion tons lost during that time…