Antarctica’s massive coastal glaciers are quickly melting into the sea as the oceans around the continent grow warmer - and the pace of ice loss is speeding up.An international satellite network measuring the thickness of the glaciers as they shrink year by year has found that the glaciers have melted so rapidly during the past 10 years that the continent is losing almost as much ice as Greenland, according to researchers gathering the satellite data.

Those satellites carry radar instruments that can measure the thickness of each glacier with remarkable accuracy, and they have now mapped more than 85 percent of the entire coastline of Antarctica, covering all the continent’s major glaciers.

For many years, scientists have watched some of these giant ice shelves breaking apart and crashing into the sea, and now more and more of them are melting as they move out over the ocean.

“The ice sheets are responding faster to climate change than (anyone) anticipated,” he said.