A hot spot is starting to form along the coast of East Antarctica.
An ice shelf that broke apart seemingly unprovoked a couple of years ago had been steadily weakening for 30 years, largely unnoticed by scientists, researchers report December 3 in Nature Geoscience. The finding, based on decades of satellite observations, raises concerns about a region of Antarctica long considered stable.
“The East Antarctic Ice Sheet holds 10 times as much ice” as West Antarctica, says Mathieu Morlighem, a glaciologist at Dartmouth College who was not part of the study. West Antarctica is already hemorrhaging ice at an alarming rate (SN: 2/15/23). But if the East Antarctic Ice
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