The melt rate of glaciers in a section of Antarctica has tripled over the past decade, researchers said in a new paper based on studies conducted over the past 21 years.

Glaciers in the Amundsen Sea in West Antarctica are losing ice faster than another part of Antarctica and are the biggest contributor to rising sea levels, said researchers at the University of California at Irvine and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. 

An international group of researchers looked into data from 1960 to 2014 for the study on the ocean surrounding Antarctica. They found that for at least five decades the water surrounding the West Antarctic shelf was warmer than the other parts of Antarctica, particularly in the Weddell Sea.

"Based on the data we were able to see that this shelf process is induced from the open ocean," said Sunke Schmidtko of the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel and the lead author of the study.

The research was published in the journal Science.

"These are the regions in which accelerated glacial melting has been observed for some time. We show that oceanographic changes over the past 50 years have probably caused this melting," said Karen Heywood, a professor of environmental sciences at the University of East Anglia.

Schmidtko added that the raised temperatures have accelerated the melting and sliding of these glaciers in the last few decades and there is no sign that this trend will change anytime soon.

"These waters have warmed in West Antarctica over the past 50 years. And they are significant shallower than 50 years ago," Schmidtko said.

The findings raise a whole new question: why is the ocean surrounding Antarctica warming?

Antarctica's climate is determined by a mix of ocean currents, snow and strong winds, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal.

"We suspect that they are related to large-scale variations in wind systems over the southern hemisphere. But which processes specifically play a role must be evaluated in more detail," according to Schmidtko.

See Now: OnePlus 6: How Different Will It Be From OnePlus 5?