Is Antarctic ice melting or not? Some does and some doesn't, depending on the day of the year and square foot of property involved.
NASA - What's Holding Antarctic Sea Ice Back From Melting?
What's Holding Antarctic Sea Ice Back From Melting?
09.01.09
Ozone depletion has caused more intense low pressure systems (shown in blue) to develop over the Amundsen and Ross Seas, while higher pressure systems (red) have developed on the periphery of the Southern Ocean. Ozone loss has likely strengthened the cyclonic wind flow across the Ross Ice Shelf and made winds cooler and stormier. Such changes can increase sea ice extent by pushing ice offshore and maintaining coastal polynyas (inset), areas of open water that tend to produce and export sea ice rapidly. Credit: Mike Marosy/NASA
Since 1979, sea ice volume has decreased in the Bellingshausen and Amundsen Seas, while it has increased in the Ross Sea and around much of the rest of Antarctica.
Since the late-1970s, the area covered by Antarctic sea ice has increased by approximately one percent per decade. This visualization, based on imagery from the AMSR-E instrument aboard the Aura satellite, shows changes to the sea ice as seen from space between June 4, 2005 and November 18, 2005. Credit: NASAGlobal temperatures are increasing. Sea levels are rising. Ice sheets in many areas of the world are retreating. Yet there’s something peculiar going on in the oceans around Antarctica: even as global air and ocean temperatures march upward, the extent of the sea ice around the southern continent isn’t decreasing. In fact, it's increasing.
Why is there such a drastic difference in the behavior of the two poles? Scientists from Goddard and the University of Washington, Seattle, recently described three theories — ozone depletion, changing ocean dynamics, and the flooding of sea ice — for what's happening in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica.
