Antarctica and Greenland are known for its ice, or ice shelves — but that might not be true after a few decades. Data from NASA’s ICESat-2 satellite, which launched in 2018 to monitor elevation changes on land (and ice) around the world by bathing the planet in laser beams, were used. “‘It’s like an architectural buttress that holds up a cathedral,’ study co-author Helen Amanda Fricker, a glaciologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, said in the statement. ‘The ice shelves hold the ice sheet up. If you take away the ice shelves, or even if you thin them, you’re reducing that buttressing force, so the grounded ice can flow faster.'” This means that the ice shelves — enormous ledges of ice floating over the ocean — are essential to keep the ice intact. This is bad because when more water intrudes the ocean, it can flow anywhere (as long as it follows the Coriolis effect), and flooding may occur sometime soon, annihilating the place.
