The Pine Island glacier was already scary.

Unlike other Antarctic glaciers, Pine Island is not sheltered from the warming ocean by a vast expanse of sea ice.

If this disintegration continues, “the whole shelf could potentially fall apart in the next few years, which is greatly faster than what we expected,” said Ian Joughin, a glaciologist at the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory who co-wrote the new report.

The loss of the ice shelf would accelerate Pine Island’s decline even further.

The glacier already adds a sixth of a millimeter to sea level rise each year; but losing the ice shelf could double or triple that rate, Joughin said.

Pine Island contains roughly 180 trillion tons of ice — enough to cause 1.6 feet of sea level rise.

It’s as if the cork in the bottle containing Pine Island glacier is crumbling.

“The observation of this process [at Pine Island glacier] is new and concerning,” said Bethan Davies, a glaciologist at Royal Holloway University of London who was not involved in the new study.

Pine Island and other West Antarctic glaciers are much bigger than the ones that flow out of the Antarctic peninsula, she noted, making the consequences of retreat far more extreme.

“It’s not at all inconceivable to say the rest of the ice shelf could be gone in a decade,” Joughin said.