The rate at which Antarctica is losing ice is about six times faster today than in 1979, and it has already pushed up the global sea level by more than half an inch.

The study by University of California-Irvine glaciologist Eric Rignot and his colleagues appears in journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. 

"That's just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak," said Professor Rignot in a statement.  "As the Antarctic ice sheet continues to melt away, we expect multi-meter sea level rise from Antarctica in the coming centuries."

The researchers used aerial photographs, radar measurements taken from space, and Landsat satellite imagery the buildup of snow on the Antarctic Ice Sheet with the amount of ice that glaciers slough off into the Southern Ocean between 1979 and 2017.  They learned that Antarctica's ice is melting far more quickly today than in the past.  In roughly the first decade that the researchers looked at, up through 1990, the continent lost 40 billion metric tons (44 billion tons) each year.   Between 2009 and 2017, that figure jumped to 252 billion metric tons (278 tons) annually

East Antarctica's Wilkes Land sector holds more ice than West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula combined, and has contributed to the rise of the world's oceans since the 1980s.