Posted 26.07.2012 12:35:41 UTC
Updated 26.07.2012 12:42:15 UTC
Following the North Pole, the South has become the focus of news stories on rapidly melting glaciers.
In Antarctica, a 100 kilometers-long giant valley that is in size of Grand Canyon in the US, was discovered under the ice-covered surface of the continent.
Polar regions are the spots where the impacts of global warming can be clearly observed in the most concrete form.
Like Greenland, which harbors the biggest ice mass in the northern hemisphere, an accelerating glacier melting has lately been observed in the South Pole.
British scientists identified a huge valley in the land section around the biggest glacier of the continent.
It was known that there were large lakes under the ice sheet and rivers were running through beneath the ice-covered surface of the continent.
However, the recently radar-located valley is measured to be 100 kilometers in length and 10 kilometers in width with a depth of 1.5 kilometers.
What is worse is that warm ocean streams speed up the melt of the glaciers as they flow into the valley which opens to sea.
Melting in Antarctica is said to have greater impact on the planet than the melting elsewhere in the world since the continent possess 90 percent of all glaciers on the earth.
Glaciers in Antarctica are melting four times faster than they were 10 years ago.
Global warming, triggered by the use of fossil fuels and green house gases, is the main cause of the glacier melting in Antarctic like many other regions on the planet.