Billions of tonnes of ice lost from Antarctic Ice sheet

Iceberg floating from the Amundsen Sea Embayment Scientists have calculated that the fastest changing Antarctic region-the Amundsen Sea Embayment-has lost more than 3,000 billion tonnes of ice over a 25-year-period. If all the lost ice was-piled on London, it would stand-over 2-km-tall -or 7.4 times the height of the Shard. If it were to cover Manhattan, it would stand at 61 km- or 137 Empire State Buildings placed-on top of one another. Twenty major glaciers form the Amundsen Sea Embayment in West Antarctica, which is more than four times the size of the UK, and-they play a key role in contributing to the level of the world's oceans. So much water is held in the snow and ice, that if it were to all to drain into the sea, global sea levels could increase by more than one metre. The research,-led by Dr Benjamin Davison at the University of Leeds,-calculated the "mass balance" of the Amundsen Sea Embayment. This describes the balance between mass of snow and ice gain due to snowfall and mass lost through calving, where icebergs form at the end of a glacier and drift out to sea.