Sometime in 2009, a long-stable, glacier-filled region in Antarctica suddenly began to melt. Fast. A team of scientists with the University of Bristol made the alarming observation by looking at data from the CryoSat-2 satellite: The glaciers around the Southern Antarctic Peninsula, which had showed no signs of change through 2008, had begun losing 55 trillion liters (14.5 trillion gallons) of ice a year. And they evidenced no signs of slowing down. “Another, previously stable sector of Antarctica has started losing mass,” Jonathan Bamber, a professor of physical geography at Bristol, and one of the authors of the startling new paper published in Science, told me. “In addition, this sector looks like it may continue to lose mass for years to decades due to the bedrock geometry.” That sector is a big one: the thawing glaciers stretch across 466 miles (750 km) of coastline, making the region the second-largest contributor to ice melt on the vast continent. Which means it will be a significant contributor to sea level rise worldwide, too.

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