Loss of Ice on the Antarctic Peninsula
Land glacier extent and volume at the northern and southern margins of the Drake Passage have been in a state of dramatic demise since the early 1990s. Space gravity observations from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) are combined with Global Positioning System bedrock uplift data to simultaneously solve for ice loss and for solid Earth glacial isostatic adjustment to Little Ice Age cryospheric loading. This image shows ice loss on the Antarctic peninsula between January 2003 and March 2010 derived from GRACE. The ice loss in the Graham Land section of the Antarctic peninsula is 32 ± 6 gigaton/year, while the total for the entire peninsula is 41.5 ± 9 gigaton/year. This ice loss corresponds to a global sea level rise of approximately 0.19 mm/year.
The Antarctic peninsula is experiencing a high rate of ice loss.
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Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
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Project support
- Marit Jentoft-Nilsen
- Mark Malanoski (Global Science and Technology, Inc.)
Release date
This page was originally published on Monday, October 21, 2013.
This page was last updated on Tuesday, November 14, 2023 at 12:23 AM EST.
Papers used in this visualization
Ivins, E. R., M. M. Watkins, D. Yuan, R. Dietrich, G. Casassa, and A. Rülke (2011), On-land ice loss and glacial isostatic adjustment at the Drake Passage: 2003-2009, J. Geophys. Res., 116, B02403, doi:10.1029/2010JB007607.