Of the Antarctica’s 162 ice shelves, 68 show significant shrinking between 1997 and 2021, while 29 grew, 62 didn’t change and three lost mass but not in a way scientists can say shows a significant trend, according to a study in Thursday’s Science Advances. These Antarctic ice shelves lost around 8.3 trillion tons (7.5 trillion metric tons) during the study period, which is an average loss of 330 billion tons (300 billion metric tons) each year. The findings come from 100,000 satellite radar images, mainly from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Copernicus Sentinel-1 and CryoSat satellite missions. „We expected most ice shelves to go through cycles of rapid but short-lived shrinking, then to regrow slowly. Instead, we see that almost half of them are shrinking with no sign of recovery.“
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