Antarctica's Ice Shelves Could be Melting Faster than We Thought

A new model developed by Caltech and JPL researchers suggests that Antarctica's ice shelves may be melting at an accelerated rate, which could eventually contribute to more rapid sea level rise. The study was conducted in the laboratory of Andrew Thompson, Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering. "There are aspects of the climate system that we are still discovering," Thompson says. "As we've made progress in our ability to model interactions between the ocean, ice shelves, and atmosphere, we're able to make more accurate predictions with better constraints on uncertainty. We may need to revisit some of the predictions of sea level rise in the next decades or century—that's work that we'll do going forward." [Caltech story]