Antarctica losing its ice sheets at an alarming rate

TAMPA, Florida - Global warming is melting ice in Antarctica faster than ever before - about six times more per year now than 40 years ago - leading to increasingly high sea levels worldwide, scientists warned on Monday.

Already, the melting ice on Antarctica has raised global sea levels more than 1.4 centimeters between 1979-2017, according to the report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed US journal.

And the pace of melting is expected to lead to disastrous sea level rise in the years to come, according to lead author Eric Rignot, chair of Earth system science at the University of California, Irvine.