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According to a new study published in Nature Geoscience,  the Antarctic icesheets could disintegrate much faster than anticipated, reports Reuters. East Antarctica has been losing ice mass at an average rate of 5 to 109 gigatonnes per year from April 2002 to January 2009. The rate speeded up from 2006. Previous estimates projected anywhere between a 4 gigatonne per year loss and a 22 gigatonne per year gain. As Jianli Chen, one of the study's authors from the University of Texas at Austin's Center for Space Research, told Reuters,

the key result is that appear to start seeing a large amount of ice loss in East Antarctica, mostly in the long coastal regions, since 2006.  This, if confirmed, could indicate a state change of East Antarctica, which could pose a large impact on global sea levels in the future.