Years of satellite record reveals high level velocity and mass discharge in Totten Glacier, East Antarctica

East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS) has an overall balanced or slightly positive mass balance. However, Wilkes Land and Totten Glacier (TG) in EAIS have been losing ice mass significantly since 1989. There is a lack of knowledge of long-term mass balance in the region which hinders the estimation of its contribution to global sea level rise. We reconstruct ice flow velocity fields of 1963–1989 in TG from the first-generation satellite images of ARGON and Landsat-1&4, and build a five decade-long record of ice dynamics. Based on these velocity maps, we show that this acceleration trend in TG has occurred since the 1960s. Combined with recently published velocity maps, we find a persistent long-term ice discharge rate of 68 ± 1 Gt/y and an acceleration of 0.17 ± 0.02 Gt/y2 from 1963 to 2018, making TG the greatest contributor to global sea level rise in EA. We attribute the long-term acceleration near grounding line from 1963 to 2018 to basal melting likely induced by warm modified Circumpolar Deep Water. The speed up in shelf front during 1973–1989 was caused by a large calving front retreat. As the current trend continues, intensified monitoring in the TG region is recommended in the next decades.