A new study estimates that global warming could push the ice sheet past a tipping point in as little as 10 years.
The point of no return in terms of ice sheet loss is arriving earlier than previously thought, and we may already be in the middle of it. That could have serious consequences for the future of sea level rise and the habitats that animals rely on.
To get a better idea of what's happening right now, the researchers went back into the past to look at ice cores from the last ice age.
The periods of rapid mass loss when the ice sheet retreated quickly, within a decade or two, were revealed in the study.
After the ice sheet continued to retreat for several hundred years, it "switched off" again, only taking a couple of decades.
The major channel known as Iceberg Alley is where the glaciers break off. Researchers can see a record of history under the water, as debris from the icebergs accumulate on the seafloor.
The team was able to identify eight phases of ice sheet retreat by combining natural and computer models of ice sheet behavior. The ice sheet destabilization happened within a decade in each case.
Satellite imagery only goes back around 40 years, but the results published by the researchers show an increase in the loss of ice from the interior of the ice sheet.
Nick Golledge, a glaciologist from the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, says that discharge of grounded ice from theAntarctic ice sheet was the cause of the multi-year time scales of the calving events.
The study shows that the sea rise pattern is the same in each of the eight phases, with global sea levels affected for several centuries and up to a millennium in some cases. The tipping points for these changes were identified by further statistical analysis.
If the current shift in ice can be seen in the same way as the past events, we might already be in the midst of a new tipping point, something we've seen in other parts of the world and the Arctic in recent years.
If the Ice Sheet behaves like it did in the past, we must be experiencing tipping right now, Thomas says.
The researchers found more evidence for the tipping points in the cores analyzed from the region.
"Our findings are consistent with a growing body of evidence suggesting the beginning of a self-sustaining and irreversible period of ice sheet retreat and substantial global sea level rise," says Michael Weber from the University of Bonn in Germany.
The research has been published.
