Image: Fotopedia

Right now, our seventh continent is disappearing more quickly than it has in the last 1,000 years. That’s because Antarctica is covered in lots of ice, and that ice is now melting faster than at any point in recorded history. 

“Since the late 1400s, there has been a nearly tenfold increase in melt intensity from 0.5 to 4.9%,” nine scientists write in a newly-published paper in Nature Geoscience. Those nine scientists have just finished analyzing the contents of a 1,200-foot core of ice they extracted from the South Pole, and their findings are grim: “Summer melting is now at a level that is unprecedented over the past 1,000 years.”

This is big news, and it’s certainly cause for alarm. Until now, climate scientists have been rather tight-lipped about the impact of global warming on the icy land mass that covers the planet’s barren south. It was clearly losing cover in some regions, but gaining in others—an inconsistency that turned Antarctica into a favorite prop for people who get paid to deny that climate change is real. The fact that Antarctica has been gaining sea ice over the last few years as the Arctic has been vanishing has been a favorite straw man for those deniers, though it is probably explained by the eroded ozone layer there.

Now, with this fresh research, the prognosis is even clearer. Antarctica is definitely melting, and will continue to do so. The continent has always seen ice melt in the summers, but as the study shows, never this rapid. And the speed of the melting synchs up with industrialization alarmingly well:

“The warming has occurred in progressive phases since about AD 1460, but intensification of melt is nonlinear, and has largely occurred since the mid-twentieth century,” the authors write. Sound familiar?

Yep. That’s exactly the pattern we’d expect to see. Antarctica’s ice melt rate is consistent with the rapid accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere, and the global average temperature trends over the same period. 

With that in mind, the scientists conclude that their research shows that the continent is far more vulnerable to climatic changes than previously believed. 

“We conclude that ice on the Antarctic Peninsula is now particularly susceptible to rapid increases in melting and loss in response to relatively small increases in mean temperature,” they write. So just imagine what a large increase in mean temperatures—the sort that’s looking increasingly likely—might do. Our planet’s iciest, coldest corner might turn into a giant slushy before we know it.