A massive melt has been documented recently on the highly vulnerable surface of West Antarctica. Scientists fear that this could be a catalyst that could trigger future catastrophes the planet gets warmer. Last year the Antarctic summer caused a large sheet of meltwater to develop on the surface of the Ross Ice Shelf, the largest ice shelf on Earth. It lasted as long as 15 days and affected an area of 300,000 square miles, which is even larger than the state of Texas according to scientists’ reports.

This is terrifying because surface melting combined with an already documented tendency of ocean-driven melting could cause West Antarctica to be completely compromise, which holds the potential to increase over 10 feet of sea level rise.

“It provides us with a possible glimpse of the future,” said David Bromwich, an Antarctic expert at Ohio State University and one of the study’s authors. The paper appeared in Nature Communications. You probably have read these analyses of West Antarctica, many people think it’s slowly disintegrating right now, and it’s mostly thought to be from the warm water eating away at the bottom of critical ice shelves,” Bromwich continued. “Well, that’s today. In the future, we could see action at the surface of these ice shelves as well from surface melting. So that makes them potentially much more unstable.”

The melt was not suddenly discovered by the naked eye. Scientists had set up a monitoring station deep in the heart of West Antarctica that detected a sharp warming of the atmosphere and the presence of clouds containing a large amount of moisture. Then they went to satellites to determine what the consequences of the event had been, and microwave data showed the large melt event. The results suggested that the Ross Ice Shelf was not covered with lakes or ponds, but rather liquid water was mixed into the snow above it.

“In some parts it could be slush for example, a mixture of ice and liquid water,” said Bromwich.

The melting coincided with a strong El Niño wave, which causes Arctic and Antarctic ice to melt every few years. This time the event brought moist air in from the ocean. Which caused rainfall, the most unusual thing to happen in Antarctica.

Scientists fear that El Niño’s could become more frequent causing more melting events like this in the future.