Antarctic Ice Sheet Has Lost a Connecticut-Sized Amount of Ice Over the Past 30 Years

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By Grace van Deelen, Eos/AGU. 

Excerpt: A new study of Antarctica has found that since 1996, its ice sheet has lost 12,820 square kilometers (nearly 5,000 square miles) of ice—nearly enough to cover the state of Connecticut, or 10 cities the size of Greater Los Angeles. The study, published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, evaluated the retreat of the ice sheet’s grounding line over the past 30 years. A grounding line is the point at which continental ice (grounded on bedrock) meets a floating ice shelf, and as such serves as a good measure of the advance and retreat of ocean-terminating glaciers.... 

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