World's biggest ice sheet stable and not yet posing threat to ocean levels

An ice sheet in Antarctica that is the world's largest-with enough water to raise global sea levels by 60 meters (200 feet)-is relatively stable and poses no immediate threat to ocean levels, according to new research.While studies of other ice sheets,like the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, show they are both at risk from global warming, the East Antarctic ice sheet will "need quite a bit of warming" to be affected, Andrew Mackintosh, a senior lecturer at Victoria University, said Wednesday.The air over the East Antarctic ice sheet, an ice mass more than 3,000 kilometers (1,875 miles) across and up to four kilometers (2.5 miles) thick centered on the South Pole, will remain cold enough to prevent significant melting in the near future,the New Zealand-led research shows.But it may eventually become vulnerable to the effects of rising sea levels driven by the melting of other ice sheets, Mackintosh's team found.Their research was published this week in the journal Geology. "The East Antarctic ice sheet is the largest and the coldest and is going to be the last to respond in any great way" to global warming, he said."Our research suggests changes in sea levels due to global warming will not be caused by changes in the East Antarctic ice sheet yet," Mackintosh said.
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http://english.pravda.ru/news/science/27-06-2007/94121-ocean-0
As in the days of Noah...