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Antarctica Is Melting Three Times As Fast As a Decade Ago (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Between 60 and 90 percent of the world's fresh water is frozen in the ice sheets of Antarctica, a continent roughly the size of the United States and Mexico combined. If all that ice melted, it would be enough to raise the world's sea levels by roughly 200 feet. While that won't happen overnight, Antarctica is indeed melting, and a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature shows that the melting is speeding up. The rate at which Antarctica is losing ice has tripled since 2007, according to the latest available data. The continent is now melting so fast, scientists say, that it will contribute six inches (15 centimeters) to sea-level rise by 2100. That is at the upper end of what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has estimated Antarctica alone could contribute to sea level rise this century.
"Around Brooklyn you get flooding once a year or so, but if you raise sea level by 15 centimeters then that's going to happen 20 times a year," said Andrew Shepherd, a professor of earth observation at the University of Leeds and the lead author of the study. Even under ordinary conditions, Antarctica's landscape is perpetually changing as icebergs calve, snow falls and ice melts on the surface, forming glacial sinkholes known as moulins. But what concerns scientists is the balance of how much snow and ice accumulates in a given year versus the amount that is lost.
"Around Brooklyn you get flooding once a year or so, but if you raise sea level by 15 centimeters then that's going to happen 20 times a year," said Andrew Shepherd, a professor of earth observation at the University of Leeds and the lead author of the study. Even under ordinary conditions, Antarctica's landscape is perpetually changing as icebergs calve, snow falls and ice melts on the surface, forming glacial sinkholes known as moulins. But what concerns scientists is the balance of how much snow and ice accumulates in a given year versus the amount that is lost.
2720 Giga-tons, sounds like a lot.
The articles are typical alarmist propaganda.
How much ice is there in Antarctica?
27,600,000 Giga-tons, so in 25 years we lost 0.01% of the ice mass.
Does not sound so scary? Even with a accelerating melt, there will be most all of the ice in 250 years, and I am guessing, many other things will change in that time period, like energy technology.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/06/14/good-news-99-989-of-the-antarctic-ice-sheet-didnt-melt/
So which is it?
The NASA article is dated Oct 2015, and it claims that the gains in West Antarctica outweigh the losses in East Antarctica. The Nature article is dated 2018, it specifically addresses the NASA data, and claims that they have even better analysis of the satellite information. This is what peer review is for. Hopefully NASA was consulted in this paper.
If you look at the list of references for this Nature article, they ignored the NASA paper. And I still wonder how anyone can take the Nature paper seriously when you have a 100% tolerance range (2720 +/- 1390).
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!