"We have found that, since 2009, the volume loss in Greenland has increased by a factor of about two, and the West Antarctic ice sheet by a factor of three," said glaciologist Angelika Humbert, one of the study's authors.
A team led by glaciologist Martin Siegert of the University of Bristol, United Kingdom, analyzed radar images of ice layers above Lake Vostok.
The team--led by glaciologist Howard Conway of the University of Washington in Seattle and geologist Brenda Hall of the University of Maine, Orono--used radar to image old layers within the ice, which revealed its growth and decay over time.
Studied by glaciologists, the temporal coincidence of glacier retreat with the measured increase of atmospheric greenhouse gases is often cited as an evidentiary underpinning of global warming.
But seven researchers at Cambridge University's Scott Polar Research Institute backed by glaciologists in the US, Europe and elsewhere, have said that both the maps and the figure of 15% are wrong.
FIRN is the name given by glaciologists to the partly compacted snow which lies, sometimes hundreds of metres thick, on top of glaciers, ice shelves and ice sheets.
But the geologists, anthropologists, glaciologists, and paleoecologists studying the last couple of million years became quite attached to the Quaternary.
Since the floods, which are one of the effects of global warming that glaciologist Lonnie Thompson predicted, Grimanesa and her family of eight have lived in a small tent with no electricity.
December 8, 1786 Freiberg, Germany December 12 , 1855Bex, Switzerland Johann von Charpentier, (born Dec. 8, 1786, Freiberg, Saxony [Germany] died Dec. 12, 1855, Bex, Switz.), pioneer glaciologist, one of the first to propose the idea of the extensive movement of glaciers as geologic agencies.
"Today we present observational evidence that a large section of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has gone into irreversible retreat," the lead author of one of the papers, Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said at a news conference.
