Antarctica is losing ice at an increasingly rapid rate

This is fine. No, seriously, it’s really not fine.

Antarctica is losing ice at an increasingly rapid rate, according to a new study published today in Nature. More than 80 researchers from 42 international organizations presented findings that show between 2012 and 2017, Antarctica's ice sheet lost 219 billion tons of ice per year -- triple the rate prior to 2012. Between 1992 and 2017, ice losses in the region contributed to a global sea level rise of 7.6 millimeters, with forty percent of that rise occurring in the last five years alone.

The global research team analyzed 24 satellite-based estimates of Antarctic ice sheet mass to calculate these rates. "We took all the estimates across all the different techniques, and we got this consensus," Isabella Velicogna, a professor at the University of California, Irvine and an author of the study, told the Washington Post. "According to our analysis, there has been a steep increase in ice losses from Antarctica during the past decade, and the continent is causing sea levels to rise faster today than at any time in the past 25 years," Andrew Shephard, lead author of the study and a professor at the University of Leeds, said in a statement.