The NASA satellite image of the Antarctic ice shelf shows that it is rapidly collapsing

An analysis of satellite data revealed Wednesday that Antarctica's coastal glaciers are losing icebergs more quickly than nature can replenish the crumbling ice, doubling previous estimates.

As a result of the first-of-its-kind study, led by scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles and published in Nature, climate change is weakening Antarctica's floating ice shelves at an alarming rate and driving global sea levels to rise.

As a result of coastal glacier chunks 'calving' off into the ocean, scientists discovered that the net loss of Antarctic ice is nearly equal to what scientists were already aware of being lost due to thinning caused by the melting of ice shelves from below by warming seas.

The analysis estimates that the combined effects of thinning and calving have reduced Antarctica's ice shelves' mass by 12 trillion tons since 1997, a double reduction from previous estimates.

Approximately 37,000 square kilometers of the continent's ice sheet have been lost to calving alone in the past quarter-century, an area almost the size of Switzerland, said JPL scientist Chad Greene.

NASA's announcement of the findings claims that Antarctica is crumbling at its edges. The continent's massive glaciers tend to accelerate and increase the rate of sea level rise when the ice shelves dwindle and weaken.'

The ice shelves hold back the glaciers that would otherwise slide into the ocean, causing sea levels to rise due to their permanent floating sheet of frozen freshwater attached to the land. In stable ice shelves, calving and regrowth maintain their size over time.

NASA reports that 139 million tons of ice have been lost between 2002 and 2020 due to warming oceans, a phenomenon previously documented by satellite altimeters measuring changes in ice height.

As part of the analysis, Greene's team synthesized satellite imagery from visible, thermal-infrared, and radar wavelengths to chart glacial flow and calving more accurately than ever before over 30,000 miles of Antarctic coastline over the last 15 years.

As a result of the losses resulting from calving, researchers concluded that Antarctica is unlikely to be able to return to its pre-2000 glacier levels by the end of the century as natural replenishment of the ice shelf has outpaced calving losses.

A warming ocean current has hit West Antarctica harder than other regions, accelerating glacial calving and ice thinning. 'We're seeing more losses than gains even in East Antarctica,' Greene said, a region with less vulnerable ice shelves.

The collapse and disintegration of the massive Conger-Glanzer ice shelf in March shocked the world, possibly giving the world a hint of further ice shelf weakness to come, according to Greene.

The study analyzes how the East Antarctic ice sheet behaved in warm periods in the past and provides models for how it might behave in the future, notes Eric Wolff, a Royal Society research professor at Cambridge University.

We should expect only modest sea level rise due to sea level rises due to the East Antarctic ice sheet if we follow the Paris agreement's 2 degrees of global warming,' Wolff wrote in a JPL commentary.