During the summer, the ice on the Antarctic Peninsula accelerates its seaward movement by 22% due to warmer ocean waters and melting snow.
This is indicated by research by the British University of Leeds and published in the journal Nature Geoscience and based on data from the Sentinel-1 satellites, the European Copernicus programme, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the European Commission.
The Antarctic peninsula is a thin strip of land that branches off from the rest of the continent for about 1,000 kilometers towards the tip of South America with mountains that reach up to 2,800 meters in height.
Although the peninsula hosts various research bases along the coasts, field analyzes of the innermost glaciers have so far been very limited due to the impervious conformation of the territory, but new data are available thanks to satellites.
By analyzing around 10,000 satellite images, in particular the radar images taken by the Sentinel-1 satellites, the researchers were able to estimate the speed of the glaciers sliding towards the sea on the entire peninsula.
They estimated that between 1992 and 2017 the melting of the ice contributed to the rise of the seas by 7.6 mm.
Thus it emerged that the ice slides 22% faster during the warm season, both due to the higher sea temperatures and the melting of the snow, which forms a sort of liquid buffer under the glacier which makes it slide more quickly .
"One of the important findings of this study is that it reveals how environmentally sensitive glaciers in Antarctica are," said lead author Ben Wallis.
