Antarctic Sheet Not Losing Ice As Fast As Previously Thought?

October 20th, 2009

Here we go again. It seems to me that these sort of things would be rather straight forward. There was this much ice this many years ago, and now there is this much ice now. That ice has been depleting at X number of meters per year, and this is the rate.

Apparently it isn’t as easy as all that, and now there is a study by the West Antarctic GPS Network (WAGN) project that shows the ice in the Antarctic isn’t necessarily depleting as fast as previously thought, and that those estimates have been slightly overestimated.

So…the global warming people can find themselves fighting with the anti-global warming (ie. Global Warming is a scam people) saying “see! I told you it wasn’t that bad!”. To the point that someone will probably end up with a metal candle sconces over the head by Miss Scarlet in the kitchen.

“Our work suggests that while West Antarctica is still losing significant amounts of ice, the loss appears to be slightly slower than some recent estimates,” said Ian Dalziel, lead principal investigator for WAGN. “So the take home message is that Antarctica is contributing to rising sea levels. It is the rate that is unclear.”

“The published results are very important because they provide precise, ground-truth GPS observations of the actual rebound of the continent due to the loss of ice mass detected by the GRACE satellite gravity measurements over West Antarctica” said Vladimir Papitashvili, acting director for the Antarctic Earth Sciences Program at the National Science Foundation, which supported the research.

WAGN researchers do not yet know how large the overestimation was. A more definitive correction will be conducted by other researchers who specialize in interpreting GRACE data. Previous estimates of postglacial rebound were made with theoretical models. Assimilation of the direct GPS results into new models will therefore produce significant improvements in estimations of ice mass loss.