Quote:Rising temperatures have caused the amount of Arctic sea ice to shrink dramatically since global observations began in the 1970s. But on the other side of the world, sea ice in Antarctica was at first steady — and then began to slowly expand in the mid-2000s.

Some researchers now say that the Antarctic trend may have been inflated by an error in the decades-long record of satellite observations of Southern Hemisphere sea ice1. Scientists process data from microwave-sensing satellites using one of two standard algorithms to distinguish bright sea ice from dark open water.

Quote:Paul Holland, an ocean modeller with the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, UK, calls the overall growth figure a distraction, and relatively modest. What truly stumps scientists, he says, is the fact that Antarctica experiences huge ice losses and competing gains in different regions, a pattern that is unaffected by this study.

“I don't think this lets us off the hook of explaining how Antarctica's sea ice is expanding in a warming world,” says Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado.

Quote:calls the overall growth figure a distraction, and relatively modest.

(07-30-2014 07:40 AM)DrTorch Wrote:  

Quote:calls the overall growth figure a distraction, and relatively modest.

Yeah, that's worth starting a thread about.