Average Antarctica Ice Still Growing PDF Print E-mail
Written by Greg Roberts and Dr. Benny Peiser   
Friday, 25 September 2009 13:18
Total Antarctica sea ice is still growing according to The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research report prepared for last week's meeting of Antarctic Treaty nations in Washington.  They noted that the South Pole had shown “significant cooling in recent decades”.

The results of ice-core drilling and sea ice monitoring indicate there is no large-scale cool-daown-antarcticamelting of ice over most of Antarctica, although experts are concerned at ice losses on the continent’s western coast.
Antarctica has 90 per cent of the Earth’s ice and 80 per cent of its fresh water, The Australian reports. Extensive melting of Antarctic ice sheets would be required to raise sea levels substantially, and ice is melting in parts of west Antarctica. The destabilisation of the Wilkins ice shelf generated international headlines this month.

However, the picture is very different in east Antarctica, which includes the territory claimed by Australia. East Antarctica is four times the size of west Antarctica and parts of it are cooling.

Australian Antarctic Division glaciology program head Ian Allison said sea ice losses in west Antarctica over the past 30 years had been more than offset by increases in the Ross Sea region, just one sector of east Antarctica.
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“Sea ice conditions have remained stable in Antarctica generally,” Dr Allison said.

The melting of sea ice - fast ice and pack ice - does not cause sea levels to rise because the ice is in the water. Sea levels may rise with losses from freshwater ice sheets on the polar caps. In Antarctica, these losses are in the form of icebergs calved from ice shelves formed by glacial movements on the mainland.

A paper to be published soon by the British Antarctic Survey in the journal Geophysical Research Letters is expected to confirm that over the past 30 years, the area of sea ice around the continent has expanded.
Last Updated on Friday, 25 September 2009 13:54
 

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