The melting of one of the west Antarctic ice sheet would alter the Earth's field of gravity and even its rotation in space so much that it would cause sea levels along some coasts to rise faster than the global average, scientists said yesterday.

An ice bridge which had apparently held a vast Antarctic ice shelf in place during recorded history shattered on Saturday and could herald a wider collapse linked to global warming.

Some 80 percent of Arctic Ice may disappear in 30 years, not 90 as scientists had previously estimated, according to a new study on the impact of global warming. Scientists made their projections based on models that accounted for changes in Arctic ice, which saw "dramatic declines" at the end of summer in 2007 and 2008, when the ice surface dropped to 4.3 and 4.6 million square kilometers (1.7 and 1.8 million square miles), respectively.

Antarctic glaciers are melting faster than previously thought, which could lead to an unprecedented rise in sea levels. Previously most of the warming was thought to occur on the narrow stretch pointing toward South America. However, a report by thousands of scientists for the 2007-2008 International Polar Year said the western part of the continent was warming up as well as the Antarctic Peninsula.

The Arctic and Antarctic regions are warming faster than previously thought, raising world sea levels and making drastic global climate change more likely than ever. The melt is particularly worrisome in West Antarctica -- and not just the Antarctic Peninsula but all along the vast coastline.

Antarctica is warming. That is the conclusion of scientists analyzing half a century of temperatures on the continent, and the findings may help resolve a climate enigma at the bottom of the planet.

As the world warms, Greenland's dwindling glaciers may actually slow in their retreat, according to new research.

Scientists have identified new rifts on an Antarctic ice shelf that could lead to it breaking away from the Antarctic Peninsula, the European Space Agency said.The Wilkins Ice Shelf, a large sheet of floating ice south of South America, is connected to two Antarctic islands by a strip of ice. That ice "bridge" has lost around 772 square miles so far this year.

Sea ice in the Arctic Ocean has melted to its lowest volume in recorded history, according to new measurements. 

Canada's ice shelves suffered massive erosion over the summer, losing almost one-quarter of their area, researchers have found.The ice shelves on the north coast of Ellesmere lost 214 square kilometres over the summer, or an area three times larger than Manhattan Island.

In northern Greenland, a part of the Arctic that had seemed immune from global warming, new satellite images show a growing giant crack and an 11-square-mile chunk of ice hemorrhaging off a major glacier, scientists said. That hass led the university professor who spotted the wounds in the massive Petermann glacier to predict disintegration of a major portion of the Northern Hemisphere's largest floating glacier within the year.

Ice at the North Pole melted at an unprecedented rate last week, with leading scientists warning that the Arctic could be ice-free in summer by 2013. Ice caps started to disintegrate dramatically several days ago as storms over Alaska's Beaufort Sea began sucking streams of warm air into the Arctic. As a result, scientists say the disappearance of sea ice at the North Pole could exceed last year's record loss. 

As Arctic sea ice vanishes, permafrost could warm much more quickly than previously thought, according to new research. Melting permafrost could then release its vast stores of carbon into the atmosphere, accelerating global warming. The study is the first to link the loss of sea ice to warmer temperatures hundreds of miles inland.

"This is just a time bomb," hydrologist Wouter Buytaert said at a meeting of geoscientists in Vienna.

The world's glaciers are melting faster than at any time since records began, threatening catastrophe for hundreds of millions of people and their eco-systems.

UK scientists working in Antarctica have found some of the clearest evidence yet of instabilities in the ice of part of West Antarctica. If the trend continues, they say, it could lead to a significant rise in global sea level.

For scientists, global warming is a disaster movie, its opening scenes set at the poles of Earth. The epic already has started. And it's not fiction. The scenes are playing, at the start, in slow motion: The relentless grip of the Arctic Ocean that defied man for centuries is melting away. The sea ice reaches only half as far as it did 50 years ago. In the summer of 2006, it shrank to a record low; this summer the ice pulled back even more, by an area nearly the size of Alaska. Where explorers 100 years ago saw "a great white disk stretching away apparently infinitely" from Ellesmere Island, there is often nothing now but open water.

Antarctica's once fringe-thawing is moving well inland, say scientists who have studied water-sensitive microwave satellite data spanning the years 1987 to 2006. The worst melting happened in the summer of 2004-2005, with snow and ice melting in unlikely places, the researchers report.

Seven years ago, data showed that Greenland's glaciers were moving into the ocean at a rate of about 6 feet a year. But flights this spring revealed that ice along the southern coast is speeding to the sea at more than 75 feet a year.

Arctic ice is melting faster than computer models of climate calculate, according to a group of US researchers. Since 1979, the Arctic has been losing summer ice at about 9% per decade, but models on average produce a melting rate less than half that figure.

A new island has appeared off the coast of Greenland, suddenly separated from the mainland by the melting of Greenland's enormous ice sheet, a development that is being seen as the most alarming sign of global warming. Several miles long, the island was once thought to be the tip of a peninsula halfway up Greenland's remote east coast but a glacier joining it to the mainland has melted away completely, leaving it surrounded by sea.

The ice atop Cordillera Blanca, the largest glacier chain in the tropics, is melting fast because of rising temperatures, and peaks are turning brown. The trend is highlighting fears of global warming and, scientists say, is endangering future water supplies to the arid coast where most Peruvians live.

Tides affect the speed at which an Antarctic ice sheet bigger than the Netherlands is sliding towards the sea, adding a surprise piece to a puzzle about ocean levels and global warming. The Rutford Ice Stream of western Antarctica slips about a metre (3 ft) a day towards the sea but the rate varies 20 percent in tandem with two-week tidal cycles.

Record amounts of the Arctic ocean failed to freeze during the recent winter, spelling disaster for wildlife and strengthening concerns that the region is locked into a destructive cycle of irreversible climate change.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences  has announced that the glaciers of the Tibetan plateau are vanishing so fast that they will be reduced by 50 per cent every decade. Each year enough water permanently melts from them to fill the entire Yellow River. They added that these changes will increase droughts and sandstorms over the rest of the country in what experts warn will be an "ecological catastrophe".

Global warming appears to be pushing vast reservoirs of ice on Greenland and Antarctica toward a significant, long-term meltdown. The world may have as little as a decade to take the steps to avoid this scenario.

The amount of ice flowing into the sea from large glaciers in southern Greenland has almost doubled in the last 10 years, possibly requiring scientists to increase estimates of how much the world's oceans could rise under the influence of global warming, according to a study being published today in the journal Science.

Jim Hansen: Rate of Melt Leaves Us Very Little Time To Act.

The floating cap of sea ice on the Arctic Ocean shrank this summer to what is probably its smallest size in at least a century of record keeping. That shift is hard to explain without attributing it in part to human-caused global warming, the team's members and other experts on the region said.

Greenland's cover of ice is melting ten times quicker than previously thought, an increase that could lead to floods across the world, scientists have found. Newly published research shows an alarming rise in the rate of collapse of the massive Greenland ice-sheet as a result of global warming. Scientists now believe the ice-sheet is shrinking at the rate of ten metres a year, not the one metre previously thought.

There is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than for 55m years, enough to melt all the ice on the planet and submerge cities like London, New York and New Orleans, Sir David King, the British government's chief scientific adviser has warned.

One of South America's leading natural tourist destinations, the San Rafael Glacier in Chile, is retreating at an alarming rate.

A dramatic and irreversible rise in sea levels could result from the melting of the Greenland ice sheet if global warming continues unchecked. The melting of the massive ice sheet on Greenland - which has been stable for thousands of years - could increase sea levels by as much as 7 metres (23 feet). Such a rise would inundate vast areas of land, including cities at sea level, such as London. Some densely populated regions, such as Bangladesh, may disappear.

Measures to fight global warming will have to be at least four times stronger than the Kyoto Protocol if they are to avoid the melting of the polar ice caps, inundating central London and many of the world's biggest cities, concludes a new official report. The report, by a German government body, says that "dangerous climatic changes" will become "highly probable" if the world's average temperature is allowed to increase to more than 2 degrees centigrade above what it was before the start of the Industrial Revolution.

Melting of glaciers in the Patagonian ice fields of southern Argentina and Chile has doubled in recent years, caused by higher temperatures, lower snowfall and a more rapid breaking of icebergs. The glaciers  are melting so fast they are making a significant contribution to sea-level rise.

The largest ice shelf in the Arctic -- an 80-foot-thick slab of ice nearly the size of Lake Tahoe -- has broken up, providing more evidence that the Earth's polar regions are responding to ongoing and accelerating rates of climatic change, researchers reported. The Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, on the north coast of Ellesmere Island in Canada's Nunavut territory, broke into two main parts, themselves cut through with fissures. A freshwater lake drained into the sea, the researchers reported. Large ice islands also calved off from the shelf and some are large enough to be dangerous to shipping and to drilling platforms in the Beaufort Sea.

Thousands of people in the Andes mountains of Peru are having their lives affected in both a practical and cultural way by climate change, which is causing the region's glaciers to melt. In the last three decades, Peruvian glaciers have lost almost a quarter of their area.

The political stability of Kazakhstan, a key central Asian state, could be imperilled by climate change, researchers say. They say glaciers are melting so fast in parts of Kazakhstan that the livelihoods of millions of people will be affected. The area's glaciers were losing almost two cubic kilometres of ice annually during the later 20th Century. With regional temperatures rising, researchers believe climate change is responsible.

It figured as a stop on adventurous young men's nineteenth-century Grand Tour, and in summer 300 people might climb it in a single day. This year, for the first time since its conquest in 1786, the heatwave has made western Europe's highest peak too dangerous to climb.Mont Blanc is closed.The conditions have been so extreme, say glaciologists and climate experts, and the retreat of the Alps' eternal snows and glaciers so pronounced, that the range - and its multi-billion-pound tourist industry - may never fully recover.

Grayed by the heat and riven with deep cracks, Switzerland's mighty Alpine glaciers are shrinking at a record rate in this summer's sizzling sun.  The Alpine glaciers, source of some of Europe's biggest rivers, have been in retreat for more than a century, but the loss of ice has speeded this year as temperatures have soared. "The rate of ice melt is some three or four times the usual amount," said Charly Wuilloud, head of the department of natural dangers at the Valais state forestry department.

Global warming will melt most of the Arctic icecap in summertime by the end of the century, according to a new report. Moscow and Norway reckon the Barents Sea could be a promising new area for oil and gas. The Northern Sea passage could save shippers about 10 days on a trip from Japan to Europe compared to traveling through the Suez Canal.

The vast expanse of permanent ice that has characterized the Arctic Ocean for millennia is fated to disappear far faster than anyone imagined, and will certainly be gone before the century is out, says a NASA satellite study. The startling survey shows that an area of ancient ice roughly as large as Alberta is vanishing every decade as the climate warms.