NASA Says The Antarctic Is Actually Gaining Ice

Record warm July, August, September and October – hard to believe there is any ice left anywhere on Earth, right? Slow down, Sparky, a new NASA study says Antarctica is actually gaining ice!

The surprising findings challenge a mountain of climate change research that’s that says Earth’s southernmost continent is losing land ice overall.

The joint research by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, the University of Maryland and the engineering firm, Sigma Space Corp., found the Antarctic ice sheet had a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice each year between 1992 and 2001. The ice gain slowed to 82 billion tons of ice each year between 2003 and 2008.

The Christian Science Monitor says climate scientists aren’t celebrating yet. The authors of the paper say their own research shows how difficult it is to measure ice height in Antarctica and that better tools are needed. They also say that current climate trends still mean that “it could take only a few decades for the ice melt in Antarctica to outweigh the ice gains.”