Sea Level Rise

 

Antarctic Ice Shelf

Photograph by Maria Stenzel

Higher, warmer seas undermine the massive ice shelves that jut out from the Antarctic continent, eroding them from beneath. A series of spectacular ice shelf collapses in recent decades have aggravated sea level rise not by the millions of tons of ice they dispersed into the oceans (that ice was already floating), but by allowing the glaciers they once contained to flow freely into the sea.
                                                                                                                                                National Geographic