PUBLISHED : 13 Oct 2023 at 08: 45 Ice racks act as giant ‘plugs’ at the end of glaciers and stabilise them. PARIS: More than 40 percent of Antarctica’s ice racks lost volume in 25 years, increasing the danger of sea levels increasing and with human-induced warming the mostlikely cause, researchers stated on Thursday. Ice racks are freshwater extensions of the ice sheets that cover much of Antarctica, drifting on the seas that surround the large and environmentally vulnerable continent. They act as giant “plugs” stabilising huge glaciers, slowingdown down the circulation of ice into the ocean. When ice racks diminish, these plugs damage and the rate of ice loss from the glaciers boosts. In a researchstudy released in the journal Science Advances on Thursday, researchers evaluated more than 100,000 satellite radar images to examine the health of Antarctica’s 162 ice racks. They discovered that the volume of 71 fell from 1997 to2021 “Acceleration of glaciers due to ice rack degeneration has included about 6 millimetres to worldwide sea level because the start of the researchstudy duration,” stated Benjamin Davison, a researchstudy fellow at the University of Leeds in Britain who led
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