East Antarctica Puts on Weight
27.05.2005 - Other
A satellite survey shows that between 1992 and 2003, the East Antarctic ice sheet gained about 45 billion tonnes of ice as predicted by the IPCC.
While this growth compensated in the short term a bit for the losses due to the global warming from all other glacial areas around the world it would not provide long term offsets - as temperatures rise the increases do not continue indefinitely while glacial melting does continue to increase.
Data from the European Space Agency's radar satellites ERS-1 and ERS-2, showed East Antarctica ice thickness increased at an average rate of about 1.8 centimetres per year between 1992 and 2003. The researchers have published results online (Davis C. H., Li Y., McConnell J. R., Frey M. M. & Hanna E. Science, published online. doi:10.1126/science.1110662(2005)).
