NASA says the Antarctic is GAINING ice, not losing it

Snowfall across Antarctica averages about a meter (39 inches) of snow a year – far less than Boston’s record snowfall last winter – which translates into an average of 30 centimeters (11.8 inches) of ice per year. Scientists argue the Antarctic Peninsula, Thwaites glacier and Pine Island glacier are all collapsing and could cause more sea level rise.

Journal of Glaciology, 2015.

Zwally said, “It is good news that the continent is now not contributing to the rise in sea level, but its taking around 0.23 mm away, each year which is a bad news too”. Red colors indicate a speeding up of a glacier’s movement into the sea. For instance, Greenland has enough ice for a potential 20-foot sea level rise, while East Antarctica is the vastest with almost 200 feet of sea level rise. The world’s population, the paper reads, would have to adapt to an entirely new global environment: coastal protection measures like “building or rebuilding or raising of dykes, the construction of seawalls, or the realization of landfills in the hinterland” would become essential for saving cities and their cultural heritage globally. According to his data, there is more water being added via the hose than is being lost at from the bottom.

Rather, their work is that rarest of events in climate research nowadays – a credible finding, by serious scientists without axes to grind, that calls for rethinking of a significant component in the complex mechanism of changes agreed to be occurring.

Andrew Shepherd, another researcher who has used satellite data to study Antarctica’s ice, shared similar impressions with Ars. Not exactly, researchers say.

Velocity of glaciers in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

“There’s no real way to reconcile this paper with the finding of half a dozen labs using the GRACE satellite, which consistently indicate that Antarctica is losing mass overall”, he points out in an e-mail to the Monitor.

Scambos said that the first study is more of a short-term look at what’s happening today and over the next couple decades in Antarctica, while the other is looking long-term at what will happen over centuries or even millennia if the planet continues to warm.

The sea levels are in fact rising and now the issue is that scientists have no clue why! – remember that confusion we talked about earlier? They said the research refute all the previously conducted scientific investigations, including the ones that were performed by NASA researchers themselves.

“The question for us though is how fast is that retreat going to cause sea levels to rise”. “Our main disagreement is for East Antarctica and the interior of West Antarctica; there, we see an ice gain that exceeds the losses in the other areas”, he said.

According to The Times Gazette, the study examined the surface height of Antarctic ice measured by altimeters on the radar on two satellites from European Space Agency and European Remote Sensing Agency. The researchers provided a visual concept of how a marine ice sheet instability happens.