Antarctic glacier melted more quickly last year

By Karina Grazina

MARAMBIO BASE, Antarctica (Reuters) - A glacier used as a benchmark to measure global warming's impact on the Antarctic Peninsula melted more than usual in the past year, according to an Argentine glacier researcher.

For more than 20 years, Pedro Skvarca has studied the Devil's Bay glacier on Vega Island off the Antarctic Peninsula, a part of Antarctica that is warming five times faster than the average in the rest of the world.

The whole of Antarctica holds enough ice and snow to raise world sea levels by 187 feet if it all melted over thousands of years, according to U.N. data.

Skvarca said the Devil's Bay glacier has thinned by 3.3 feet (1 meter) per year on average since his research began. But its deterioration has been unusually marked in the past year.

"We've observed a tremendous ablation (during the past year), which is really unusual," Skvarca, head of the Argentine Antarctic Institute's Glaciology Division, told Reuters in an interview at Argentina's main center for studying Antarctica, the Marambio base.

Ablation is the melting and falling away of ice in the zone at the foot of a glacier.

"(Last year) I put a box with a thermometer in it next to a marker that was level with the top of the ice. I found it half a meter in the air hanging from a wire," he said last week.

ICE MASSES