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Antarctica's fastest-changing region has lost 3,000 billion tonnes of ice.

More than 3,000 billion tonnes of ice has been lost in the Antarctic's fastest-changing region - the Amundsen Sea Embayment - in just 25 years.

If this quantity of ice was piled on London, it would be stacked 2km high - over seven times the height of the Shard, research by the University of Leeds suggests.

Should it be piled on top of Manhattan, the Empire State Building would be buried 137 times over with the ice and snow standing at 61km tall.

Located in West Antarctica, the Amundsen Sea Embayment is comprised of 20 major glaciers and covers more than four times the surface area of the UK.

It plays a crucial role in the level of the world's oceans.

If its glaciers fully melt, so much water is held in its snow and ice that global sea levels would rise by more than a metre.

The research, published in the scientific journal Nature Communications, calculated the "mass balance" of the Amundsen Sea Embayment.

It describes the balance between mass of snow and ice gain due to snowfall and mass lost through calving, where icebergs form at the end of a glacier and drift out to sea.

When calving happens faster than the ice is replaced by snowfall, the Embayment loses mass overall - and this contributes to a global rise in sea levels.

The result would be the same if the supply of snowfall were to drop.

The study saw a net decline of 3,331 billion tonnes of ice between 1996 and 2021 - contributing more than nine millimetres to global sea levels.

Source: https://news.sky.com

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