Massive Antarctica Ice Sheet Thinning From below: Global Warming is happening

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/03/17/1371505/-Significant-News-Massive-East-Antartica-Ice-Sheet-Thinning-Increasing-Due-to-Climate-Change?detail=facebook_sf

Yesterday, Pakalolo posted an important diary about the recently discovered acceleration in melting underneath the floating ice shelf ice sheet which supports the massive East Antarctica glacial field known as the Totten Glacier.

The findings about East Antarctica emerge from a new paper just out in Nature Geoscience by an international team of scientists representing the United States, Britain, France and Australia. They flew a number of research flights over the Totten Glacier of East Antarctica — the fastest-thinning sector of the world’s largest ice sheet — and took a variety of measurements to try to figure out the reasons behind its retreat. And the news wasn’t good: It appears that Totten, too, is losing ice because warm ocean water is getting underneath it. [...] The floating ice shelf of the Totten Glacier covers an area of 90 miles by 22 miles.

The Totten glacier already releases the most water of any glacier in Antarctica with an yearly amount of ice melt "equivalent to 100 times the volume of Sydney Harbour every year."   As Pakaloo's diary noted yesterday NASA and the University of Texas published a study  in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature Geoscience that "shows shows the discovery of 2 seafloor troughs that bring in warm ocean water to the base of the Totten Glacier."