New research suggests that Antarctica’s melting ice sheet could be retreating much faster than previously thought. The evidence comes from seabed tracks off Norway that record the retreat of the melting European glacier thousands of years ago. Today, the fastest-retreating glaciers in Antarctica are shown to be retreating by up to 30m per day. But if it were to accelerate, the additional meltwater would have a major impact on rising sea levels around the world. The loss of ice from Antarctica, caused by climate change, has already raised global sea levels by almost 1cm since the 1990s. The researchers found that the maximum retreat for the Norwegian ice sheet was more than 600m per day. „This is what we could expect if we continue with the upper estimates of temperature increases,“ explained Dr. Christine Batchelor of Newcastle University in the UK. "Although it is worrying that when we were doing equations to think about what it would take to cause such a retreat in Antarctica, we actually found that there are places where you could get similar impulses of retreat even at the rate of base layer melting that we know is happening at the moment," she told BBC News.