Polar regions found warming fast, raising sea levels

GENEVA (Reuters) - The Arctic and Antarctic regions are warming faster than previously thought, raising world sea levels and making drastic global climate change more likely than ever, international scientists said on Wednesday.

New evidence of the trend was uncovered by wide-ranging research in the two areas over the past two years in a United Nations-backed program dubbed the International Polar Year (IPY), they said.

"Snow and ice are declining in both polar regions, affecting human livelihoods as well as local plant and animal life in the Arctic as well as global atmospheric circulation and sea-level," according to a summary of a report by the researchers.

An assessment of the findings of the research was still being refined, said the IPY's "State of Polar Research" report.

"But it now appears certain that both the Greenland and the Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass and thus raising sea level, and that the rate of ice loss from Greenland is growing," it said.

"New data also confirm that warming in the Antarctic is much more widespread than it was thought prior to IPY."

More than 63 countries and some 10,000 scientists took part in the $1.5 billion program, which began in March 2007 and ends next month.

IPY experts told a news conference that melting appeared to be speeding up, especially in the Western Antarctic region that stretches to near the southern tip of Latin America and which had earlier been thought stable.

"One could expect to see quite dramatic changes in weather in Chile and Argentina as a result," said Ian Allison, a co-chairman of the program's steering committee.