Ice melting in Greenland and Antarctica will have dramatic consequences, according to the science team who analyzed data collected over the past 25 years by NASA and European satellites. They warn that melting ice in Greenland and Antarctica will have dramatic consequences on the cities situated close to oceans and seas. Another recent study conducted by NASA has revealed the acceleration of ice melting in Antarctica.
If the ice will melt almost completely, metropolitan areas such as New York, Miami, Venice, Rotterdam, Athens, Istanbul, Naples and, in general, cities located in coastal areas will be flooded or even destroyed.
NASA plans to launch two new satellites this year with a punctual mission to gain greater accuracy in sea level predictions.
The NASA’s study
Scientists at NASA gathered the images taken by the NASA-U.S. Geological Survey Landsat satellite to create a computerized image of Antarctic ice flow.
“We’re entering a new age. When I began working on this project three years ago, there was a single map of ice sheet flow (…) Now we can map ice flow over nearly the entire continent, every year,” declared Alex Gardner, a cryosphere researcher at the NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.
Alex Gardner believes that studying this new data will help scientists depict the exact ice flow acceleration.
Studying the Antarctic glaciers meltdown during the last seven years, NASA researchers showed that Antarctica ice is melting faster in the West of the continent, while in the East, the glaciers show a steady melting pace.
The study also revealed that the ice flow in the ocean was of 2,000 gigatons (1 gigaton = 1 billion tons) in 2015 and is increasing with approximately 36 gigatons per year.
It has been shown that the Western glaciers of Antarctica contributed for 89% of the continent’s glacier discharge in the ocean. Therefore, this study triggers an alarm signal that climate changes have a huge negative impact on the Antarctica ice flow.