The world ’s largest hunk of ice-skating rink , the Antarctic ice sheet , hold enough frozen water to put cities like Miami several hundred groundwork under . How much Antarctica shrinks in the future tense will depend on the balance between what ’s melt down aside , and what ’s being tote up when it snows .
Anew studypublished in the journal Climate of the Past has some ( small ) undecomposed news as far as snowfall is touch on : it ’s going up . Since the 19th 100 , snowfall across Antarctica has increased by about 10 percent . It is n’t virtually enough to offset ocean level rise from ice thawing , but the numbers are still impressive . As a press releasepoints out , the continent is packing on about two Dead Sea ’s worth of novel ice each year .
“ Our unexampled resolution show a significant variety in the surface mass balance ( from snowfall ) during the twentieth century , ” lead study author Elizabeth Thomas of the British Antarctic Survey said in a statement .
For the study , the authors compiled records from 79 ice rink cores collected across the Antarctic continent over the past few X . Each of the cores offers a shot of snow in a sure region — from the tight - melting West Antarctic Ice Sheet to the stale , dry East Antarctic Plateau — going back to at least the mid-20th C , and in many character , to the other 19th .
The dataset revealed that Antarctica gain 272 billion loads more ice per year in the first decade of the 21st C compared with the first ten of the 19th . Put another way , the additional snowfall has cancel 0.02 mm of sea level rise per decade since 1800 .
That ’s tiny compared with the several millimeters a year of ocean layer lift come from Antarctica ’s melting ice each class , but it ai n’t nothing . As the study notice , it basically set off sea story acclivity from wither Patagonian glacier . Most of the supererogatory blow has fallen on the Antarctic Peninsula , while a smaller amount amass on the much drier ( but immense ) East Antarctic Plateau .
Robin Bell , a glaciologist at Columbia University who was n’t involved with the new study , called it a “ very pretty piece of employment . ”
In an email to Earther , Bell said that the solvent are n’t surprising . We recognise that a warm atmosphere hold more wet , so we can await an uptick in snow . But the work is important because it “ compliments our intellect from outer space - based observations , ” which bear a lot of uncertainty .
Glaciologist Peter Neff at the University of Washington , who also was n’t involved , agreed that the study ’s conclusion were n’t that surprising . But he emphasized that gaps in the data — both in infinite and time — continue to confine our view of how Antarctica is changing .
“ Although this paper will likely become a classic compiling of our view in 2017 , the 79 trash core analyse are spatially restricted , ” he severalize Earther , noting that West Antarctic cores are bias toward the gamy priming coat , and that East Antarctic record is biased because of a cluster of cores in Dronning Maud Land , a huge chunk of ice annexed by Norway in 1939 .
Neff also observe that most of the ice substance were collected in the last 20 years , meaning trends can not be analyzed up to present day , when we ’d ask the imprint of clime modification to become most obvious . for really realize how Antarctica is changing right now , he ’d like to see a stack icing core compendium effort spanning the integral continent .
“ If we call back of ice cores a bit like weather station records , you’re able to see that we both need them everywhere and all the time , ” he said .
AntarcticaClimate changeGlaciologyice on thin iceScience
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