Courtesy The Herald Sun LONDON -- The Earth is on a fast track to global warming, scientists have warned. And warming has led to a massive increase in the amount of ice flowing into the sea. Greenhouse gases are being released 30 times faster than the emissions that led to a period of extreme global warming 55 million years ago, the American Association for the Advancement of Science's annual conference in St Louis was told yesterday. Temperatures around the planet shot up by 5C after a huge release of carbon dioxide and methane gases over 10,000 years. But the same amount of carbon is expected to be released into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels in the next 300 years, California University researchers said.

_{Photo Courtesy NASA} The conference also heard the quantity of ice coming off Greenland's glaciers into the Atlantic had almost doubled in the past five years. There are fears that experts may have significantly underestimated how much sea levels could rise as a result. The study is the first to examine the rate of change in glaciers to establish how much ice is being lost from Greenland. The Greenland Ice Sheet – a mass of glacial ice and snow covering 1.9 million sq km – is twice the size of France and Germany put together. It could raise the global sea level by 7m if it melted entirely. In the past 20 years, air temperature in southeast Greenland has risen by 3C. Eric Rignot, of the California Institute of Technology, said Greenland could be contributing as much as 0.5mm to the global sea-level rise each year. Details of the study were also published yesterday in the journal . Last September, American experts warned if trends continued, the summertime Arctic Ocean could be ice-free by the end of the century. A recent British report warned that melting ice could increase sea levels by 12m unless temperatures stabilised.
_{Photo Courtesy Oregan university}