
Antarctica is losing sea-ice at record levels. It's time to pay attention
The melting of ice sheets in the Arctic this summer is unprecedented. But its southern counterpart poses a much more serious threat to sea levels.
I am Professor of Polar Geodesy and ARC Future Fellow at the University of Tasmania. My field of expertise is geodetic observation of Earth deformation and the global water cycle, including ice-sheet mass balance and sea-level change and particularly using the Global Positioning System (GPS) and the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE). I also work on reduction of systematic and random errors in these techniques in order to maximise the information content in the data and improve the reliability of the interpretations. I have authored more than 80 peer-reviewed publications including several articles in the leading scientific journals Science, Nature, Nature Geoscience, Nature Climate Change and Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. In 2015 I was awarded the Royal Society (London) Kavli Medal and Lecture (see the lecture at https://royalsociety.org/events/2015/04/continental-loss).
The melting of ice sheets in the Arctic this summer is unprecedented. But its southern counterpart poses a much more serious threat to sea levels.
Icebergs breaking off Antarctica, even massive ones, do not typically concern glaciologists. But the impending birth of a new massive iceberg could be more of a problem.
Advanced Global Positioning Systems (GPS) reveal how and why the Earth’s surface is constantly changing its direction of travel.