A new study reveals that the thickness of Antarctica's floating ice shelves have decreased by 18 percent from almost two decades and scientists believe this phenomenon is strongly linked to climate change.

Research findings were taken from data of satellite missions spanning 20 years, which show how ice volume decline is occurring at an unprecedented rate.

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The research team from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography of the University of California in San Diego built a new high resolution record of Antarctica's ice shelf thickness from satellite radar altimetry mission conducted by the European Space Agency from 1994 to 2012.

After merging data from three overlapping satellite missions, researchers identified specific changes of ice thickness that occurred more than 10 years ago. This breakthrough method made it easier to study trends from single missions that only provide photographs.

The total ice shelf volume is calculated by mean thickness multiplied by the ice shelf area. In this study, Antarctica's ice shelves showed that they only changed a little from 1994 to 2003 but after that, they rapidly declined.

The West Antarctic ice shelves lost ice during the entire observation period but the most significant change was accelerated loss that only happened in the few years of this decade.

According to Scripps researcher Fernando Paolo, this 18 percent decline in ice shelves over 18 years is a substantial change. This study does only show how much ice shelf volume is decreasing but there is an acceleration happening in the last decade, he says.

Researchers say these melting ice shelves don't affect sea levels rising, but they note there is an important indirect effect. According to Scripps glaciologist Helen Amanda Fricker, the ice shelves support the flow of grounded ice into the ocean where this flow can impact how sea levels rise.

To date, the thinning ice shelves rate in West Antarctica can result in ice shelves losing more than half of their volume in the next 200 years. This study was published in the journal, Science.

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