Antarctica’s melting ice sheet could retreat much faster than previously thought. Withdrawing glaciers in Antarctica currently retreat by up to 30 metres a day. But if they sped up, the extra melt water would have big implications for sea-level rises globally. Ice losses from Antarctica caused by climate change have already pushed up the surface of the world's oceans by nearly 1 cm since the 1990s. Researchers have been looking at a great swathe of seafloor which twenty thousand years ago was witness to a massive ice sheet in the process of withdrawal and break-up: the maximum retreat was 600+ metres a day. Their research is recorded in this week's edition of the journal Nature. Scientists look into the geological past to tell us what is possible. Satellite records only cover forty years or so. This geological record has actually happened in the real world, not in a computer model world.