A huge chunk of Antarctic ice can’t withstand nonstop global warming, according to a new study published in the latest Nature magazine. And if it melts, the ice will raise the global sea level by 15 or 20 feet – or more. The only good news here is the catastrophe isn’t likely to unfold quickly. The ice in question is called the West Antarctic ice sheet. In some ways, it’s the planet’s Achilles’ heel. It holds a vast amount of water, locked up as ice, and it’s sitting below sea level, so it’s inherently unstable. Research On The West Antarctic Ice Sheet David Pollard at Penn State University says there has been intense research recently to figure out how the ice sheet has behaved over the past 5 million years. ‘Before there was only a vague idea of how the West Antarctic ice sheet grew and decayed over those time scales,’ he says. Now, a scientific drilling project has brought back sediment samples taken from underneath the ice sheet, allowing scientists to study the mud layers, like so many tree rings, to show what ice there has done over history. ‘It’s really exciting,’ […]