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NASA Study Shows Net Gains For Antarctic Ice (google.com)
A widely circulated NASA study published in the Journal of Glaciology, and reported by UPI, says that Antarctic ice has measurably thickened in recent decades, a conclusion at odds with earlier findings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, "which in 2013 suggested gains were not keeping up with losses." The new study ... doesn't totally undermine the handful of studies showing significant glacier, ice sheet and sea ice shrinkage. Instead, if offers evidence of previously unaccounted gains. ... The new tallies reveal an annual net gain of 112 billion tons between 1992 and 2001. Annual gains of 82 billion tons were observed between 2003 and 2008.
ManBearPig, wherefore art thou ...
It's certainly not a reliable report for what they are attempting to do, in a general sense it is, but overall there are plenty of unknowns, assumptions, and corrections in the data.
But... Your comment that "this hardly looks like settled science to me" is pulling in a claim around the Anthropogenic Climate Change and the Greenhouse Effect - That science is SETTLED my friend.
One thing you mustn't read from this is that it's all fine. It's not, even with the new report with it's now take on it, there is still an increase in outflow, so even if they are correct, they also show how that rate of increase in going down and accelerating.
If they are correct, or somewhat correct about the Antarctic gaining ice, then the very obvious place to look at why the sea level is rising that 20% would be the Arctic (Greenland specifically), which is exactly what they are doing.