Ice sheets frozen for million of years could disappear sooner than we thought as a new study showed that apart from the 'melting' effect of global warming on Earth's poles, the warming water beneath the polar ice reserves could also drastically speed up their evaporation.

In a new report published by the journal Nature Geoscience on Sunday, researchers from the University of Arizona claimed that ice presence in Greenland and Antarctica may vanish much quicker than projected by scientists and the likely culprit could be warming water seeping through these ice reserves.

Lead author Jianjun Yin said that the new scientific finding was alarming as warm water could induce more water ending up on the seas when grounded ice begins melting due to the relatively higher temperature being carried by the warm water beneath the ice sheets.

Yin stressed that scientists generally assume that melting floating ice will not change the current sea level, which he said contributed to the oversight on the likely effect of warming water intruding on the polar ice.

Yin pointed out in the new report that "warming is very important compared to atmospheric warming because water has a much larger heat capacity than air."

Putting his idea into perspective, Yin pointed to an ice cube that was deliberately left in a warm room, which he said would only disappear after some few hours but "if you put an ice cube in a cup of warm water, it will disappear in just minutes."

In almost the same manner, the study said that floating ice traveling through the poles coastal areas could facilitate for the rapid flow of glaciers, which according to Jonathan Overpeck, co-author of the report, will definitely deliver more water into the seas.

In a statement, Overpeck added that allowing such process to take place unchecked will mean that "both Greenland and Antarctica are probably going to melt faster than the scientific community previously thought."

The new study claimed that by the end of the current century, Earth's sea level would rise by at least one metre and should continue its upward surge in the centuries ahead as the researchers noted that Greenland's coast could warm up by at least 2 degrees Celsius while in Antarctica, it would be around 0.5 degrees Celsius by the turn of the century.