 It slowly shriveled from its peak size at the end of the Little Ice Age around 1850, but then that melt rate sped up about 10 years ago, according to a study in Tuesday's Nature Communications. It's melting so fast that the flow of ice into water from now averages about 50,000 gallons every second, according to study co-author Maury Pelto, a professor of environmental science near Nichols College in Massachusetts. Only four Juneau Icefield glaciers melted out of existence between 1948 and 2005, and