EARTH’S largest ice sheet has till now seemed well able to withstand the effects of climate change, but it may have a hidden weakness. While models predict the air over the East Antarctic ice sheet will remain chilly enough to prevent significant melting for at least a century, a new study suggests that rising sea levels – caused by melting elsewhere – could be its undoing (Geology, vol 35, p 551).
A team led by Andrew Mackintosh at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, gauged the ice sheet’s past thickness by measuring how high the ice had deposited boulders in Antarctica’s…
