GENEVA — Glaciers in Antarctica are melting faster and across a much wider area than previously thought, threatening to raise sea levels worldwide and force millions of people to flee low-lying areas, scientists said Wednesday.
Researchers once believed that the melting was limited to the Antarctic Peninsula, a narrow tongue of land pointing toward South America. But satellite data and automated weather stations now indicate it is more widespread.
The melting “also extends all the way down to what is called west Antarctica,” said Colin Summerhayes, executive director of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research, based in Great Britain.
By the end of the century, the accelerated melting could cause sea levels to climb by 3 to 5 feet — levels substantially higher than predicted by a major scientific group just two years ago.
Making matters worse, scientists said, the ice shelves that hold the glaciers back from the sea are weakening.
The report Wednesday from Geneva was a broad summary of two years of research by scientists from 60 countries. Some of the findings were released in earlier reports.
In Washington, as part of an overall update on global warming, top researchers on Wednesday sounded a similar warning to the U.S. Senate about rising temperatures in the Antarctic.
The head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group set up by the United Nations, told lawmakers on the Environment and Public Works Committee that Earth has about six more years at current rates of carbon dioxide pollution before it is locked into a future of severe global warming.
For years, the continent at the bottom of the world seemed to be the only place on the planet not experiencing climate change.
Previous research indicated that temperatures across much of Antarctica were staying the same or slightly cooling.
The report Wednesday was compiled as part of the 2007-08 International Polar Year, an effort by scientists to conduct intense Arctic and Antarctic research over the past two Antarctic summers.
The big surprise was exactly how much glaciers are melting in western Antarctica, a vast land mass on the Pacific Ocean side of the continent that is next to the South Pole and includes the Antarctic Peninsula.
The glaciers are slipping into the sea faster because the floating ice shelf that would normally stop them — usually 650 to 980 feet thick — is melting. And the glaciers’ discharge is making a significant contribution to increasing sea levels.
Some people “fear that this is the first signs of an incipient collapse of the west Antarctic ice sheet,” Summerhayes said.
