Remember when a "glacial" pace meant "very slowly?"

Leading climate change deniers Senators Jim Inhofe and Ron Johnson, correct your dictionaries: 

Ice is disappearing at a truly astonishing rate in Austfonna, an expanse of frozen rock far north of the Arctic Circle in Norway’s Svalbard island chain. Just since 2012, a portion of the ice cap covering the island has thinned by a whopping 160 feet, according to an analysis of satellite measurements by a team led by researchers at Britain’s University of Leeds.

Put another way, the ice cap’s vertical expanse dropped in two years by a distance equivalent to the height of a 16-story building. As another comparison, consider that scientists were recently alarmed to discover that one of Western Antarctica’s ice sheets was losing vertical height at a rate of 30 feet a year.

In this case, the ice cap lost one-sixth of its original thickness in two years, and the flow of ice from the summit to the sea accelerated by 25 fold, to a rate of several kilometers a year, a fast clip by glacier standards, the study found. 

Caption: Heavily crevassed terminus of Kapp Mohn outlet glacier, Austfonna, in May 2013, after 25-fold increase in flow speed (Dunse et al., The Cryosphere Discussions, 2014). Credit: Thorben Dunse, University of Oslo