a new nasa study, released on friday, admits that ice is accumulating in antarctica. satellite measurements show an 82-112 gigaton-a-year net ice gain. that’s 82-112 billion tons per year! nine zeroes! in other words that is 112,000,000,000 tons. per year. it’s hard to comprehend how much ice that really is, so let’s put it in perspective. let’s assume that they’re talking short tons (2,000 lbs). that’s about the weight of an old vw beetle. those old beetles measured 14 feet long.  multiply 112 billion by 14 feet and you get 1,560 billion feet. divide that by the distance from the earth to the moon (239,000 miles),  and you’d have a string of vw beetles stretching all the way to the moon. not once, not twice, but 45 times.  all the way to the moon. that’s a helluva lot of new ice. every single year. and we’re worried about global warming? not only is the antarctic ice sheet growing, nasa admits that the growth is actually reducing sea-level rise. this also confirms what i’ve been saying all along. antarctica contains 90 percent of the earth’s ice. if the antarctic ice sheet is growing, wouldn’t that mean that more than 90 percent of the world’s glaciers are growing? here are excerpts, taken from nasa’s own website: “nasa – antarctic ice sheet is growing” a new nasa study says that an increase in antarctic snow accumulation that began 10,000 years ago is currently adding enough ice to the continent to outweigh the increased losses from its thinning glaciers. the research challenges the conclusions of other studies, including the intergovernmental panel on climate change’s (ipcc) 2013 report, which says that antarctica is overall losing land ice. according to the new analysis of satellite data, the antarctic ice sheet showed a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001. that net gain slowed to 82 billion tons of ice per year between 2003 and 2008. “we’re essentially in agreement with other studies that show an increase in ice discharge in the antarctic peninsula and the thwaites and pine island region of west antarctica,” said jay zwally, a glaciologist with nasa goddard space flight center in greenbelt, maryland, and lead author of the study, which was published on oct. 30 in the journal of glaciology. “our main disagreement is for east antarctica and the interior of west antarctica – there, we see an ice gain that exceeds the losses in the other areas.”  zwally added that his team “measured small height changes over large areas, as well as the large changes observed over smaller areas.” scientists calculate how much the ice sheet is growing or shrinking from the changes in surface height that are measured by the satellite altimeters. in locations where the amount of new snowfall accumulating on an ice sheet is not equal to the ice flow downward and outward to the ocean, the surface height changes and the ice-sheet mass grows or shrinks. the study analyzed changes in the surface height of the antarctic ice sheet measured by radar altimeters on two european space agency european remote sensing (ers) satellites, spanning from 1992 to 2001, and by the laser altimeter on nasa’s ice, cloud, and land elevation satellite (icesat) from 2003 to 2008. they also used information on snow accumulation for tens of thousands of years, derived by other scientists from ice cores, to conclude that east antarctica has been thickening for a very long time. the extra snowfall that began 10,000 years ago has been slowly accumulating on the ice sheet and compacting into solid ice over millennia, thickening the ice in east antarctica and the interior of west antarctica by an average of 0.7 inches (1.7 centimeters) per year. “the good news is that antarctica is not currently contributing to sea level rise, but is taking 0.23 millimeters per year away,” zwally said.
climate shock: 90 percent of the world’s glaciers are growing