Explainer: Ice Melt and Antarctica

It is most unlikely to happen, but if all the ice in Antarctica were to melt, the sea level would rise 57 metres. That would put the Netherlands almost completely under water. For a long time, scientists thought this was impossible: the South Pole is unassailable. It turns out otherwise. Our PhD candidate Sophie de Roda Husman investigates the real situation and explains that one fragmenting ice shelf triggers a series of events that accelerate the melting process in this movie from Universiteit van Nederland. For her doctorate Sophie created a historical record of Antarctic surface melt that is high-resolution in both space and time, by gathering a large amount of data with remote sensing techniques.  

Watch the movie (in Dutch):