The rising temperature has melted the snow blanket in a California-sized region of Antarctica, NASA said after receiving new satellite imagery.
Scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Colorado were quite worried after images showed that vast ice has melt in the region, where it was deemed quite unlikely.
They went on to describe it as the most significant melt observed using satellites in the last three decades.
Konrad Steffen, director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado, said melting on such a large scale had not been witnessed earlier.
He said
Antarctica has shown little to no warming in the recent past with the exception of the Antarctic Peninsula, but now large regions are showing the first signs of the impacts of warming
For their research, the scientists used satellite scatterometry, a sophisticated imaging system, which can distinguish between recently frozen ice and snow which remain frozen since a long time.
Photo: Greenpeace