A comprehensive, 21-year study jointly conducted by University of California, Irvine (UCI), and NASA reveals that the melting of glaciers in Antarctica has tripled during the last decade.

The glaciers in the Amundsen Sea Embayment in West Antarctica are melting  faster than any other part of Antarctica and are the most significant Antarctic contributors to sea level rise.

“The mass loss of these glaciers is increasing at an amazing rate,” said scientist Isabella Velicogna, jointly of UCI and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. Velicogna is a coauthor of a paper on the results, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

This study by scientists at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), and NASA used four different measurement techniques to produce an authoritative estimate of the amount and the rate of loss over the last two decades.

Lead author Tyler Sutterley, a doctoral candidate at UCI, and his team did the analysis to verify that the melting in this part of Antarctica is shifting into high gear.

As a part of the study the researchers reconciled measurements of the mass balance of glaciers flowing into the Amundsen Sea Embayment. Mass balance is a measure of how much ice the glaciers gain and lose over time from accumulating or melting snow, discharges of ice as icebergs, and other causes. Measurements from all four techniques were available from 2003 to 2009. Combined, the four data sets span the years 1992 to 2013.

The scientists mentioned they are facing a difficulty in predicting the changes future sea level due to the unpredictable rate at which the glacier are melting every year.