Antarctica’s Pine Glacier Melting 50% Faster, Study Indicates

West Antarctica’s biggest glacier is melting 50 percent faster than in 1994, adding to a global increase in sea levels, U.S. and U.K. scientists found.

The Pine Island glacier is losing about 78 cubic kilometers (30 cubic miles) of ice per year, the researchers at Columbia University in New York and the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, England, said today. That’s up from 53 cubic kilometers in 1994. The study in the journal Nature Geoscience is based on data from a 2009 expedition.