The Alarming Speed of Melting Ice Sheets and Rising Sea Levels.

Ice sheets can retreat at a pace of up to 600 meters per day during periods of global warming, which is 20 times quicker than the previous highest recorded rate of retreat. An international team of scientists utilized high-resolution imagery of the ocean floor to uncover the rapid pace at which a former ice sheet that stretched from Norway receded at the end of the last Ice Age, approximately 20,000 years ago. The researchers mapped more than 7,600 small-scale landforms called ‘corrugation ridges’ across the seafloor and found that the former ice sheet underwent pulses of rapid retreat at a speed of 50 to 600 meters per day.