Earth's Two Ice Sheets Melting Faster Than Expected, Surprising Study Finds

The massive Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets that sit near Earth's two poles are melting at an increasingly faster pace, a new study finds.

The study, based on measurements covering nearly 20 years, suggests the melting ice sheets are becoming the dominant contributor to global sea level rise, overtaking the loss of ice from Earth's mountain glaciers and ice caps, much sooner than climate models had predicted.

"That ice sheets will dominate future sea level rise is not surprising — they hold a lot more ice mass than mountain glaciers," said lead author Eric Rignot, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and the University of California, Irvine. "What is surprising is this increased contribution by the ice sheets is already happening." Rignot is lead author of the study detailed this month in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Read more at: LiveScience