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The British Antarctic Survey website offers a concise description of the science questions surrounding the West Antarctic ice sheet:

"The West Antarctic ice sheet is unique in that it rests of on rock that is, in places, thousands of metres below sea level, and over large areas, the present ice sheet would not need to thin by much in order of the ice to begin to float. This means that the West Antarctic ice sheet may be uniquely capable of rapid deglaciation, and is the focus of considerable concern. A decade of satellite measurements of the ice sheet surface in West Antarctica have shown that the portion of the ice sheet that drains into the Amundsen Sea is thinning at rates of several centimetres to several metres per year. Several neighbouring glacier basins appear to be behaving in a similar fashion, and thinning is most concentrated on the fast-moving parts of those glaciers, suggesting that this is the result of a dynamic change in the ice sheet itself rather than a change in snowfall. All the glaciers effected drain into the same part of the Amundsen Sea, and so it is likely that the change in the ice sheet across this region has its root cause in those waters. At present, the timescales of the changes in the sea condition, that might be driving the ice sheet, are not clear, and there are too few measurements to establish whether any change is on-going. Since ocean temperature and circulation is linked to atmospheric climate, the oceans provide plausible connection between anthropogenic greenhouse emissions and the changes we are seeing in this part of the Antarctic ice sheet. However there are other, competing theories as to why this change may be taking place; for example, it is possible that this is part of a longer-term retreat of the ice sheet has been going on for millennia.

The questions of whether observed changes are evidence of an imminent deglaciation of this area, and whether that change was caused by human influence, is now a major research priority. If deglaciation of this portion of the ice sheet were to begin, then present estimates of the likely rate of sea-level rise over the coming centuries could be significantly too low."

Read their entire report here:

The Antarctic ice sheet and rising sea levels