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It's not -- as Plait points out, Antarctica is still losing ice, on the whole. The usual rush-to-write-a-click-worthy-headline effect happened, and the report t
by thaumaturgy 11y ago
It's not -- as Plait points out, Antarctica is still losing ice, on the whole. The usual rush-to-write-a-click-worthy-headline effect happened, and the report that everyone's talking about doesn't actually say that there's an increase of ice over all of Antarctica.
- caseysoftware 11y agoThe article says exactly what you say it doesn't: "Using satellite data, researchers estimate the Antarctic ice sheet had a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice per year from 1992 to 2001. This net gain eventually slowed between 2003 and 2008 to 82 billion tons of ice per year." which is lifted almost verbatim from the NASA discussion of the report: http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-mass-gains-of-antarctic-ice-sheet-greater-than-losses http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-mass-gains-of... and further goes on to say: “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.” The net gain is slowing but there is still a gain.
- thaumaturgy 11y agoYou're right, I didn't read the article carefully enough. In my defense, it has things like "rate of change: -134 billion metric tons per year" and "Antarctica is still losing hundreds of billions of tons of ice per year" and "if Antarctica was actually gaining ice" and so on ... when what it means is, Antarctica is still (net) gaining ice, but it's also losing ice more rapidly, and in the near future the loss will outpace the gain.