Two different areas of Antarctica tell two very different stories about how climate change might be affecting ice melt. The data appear to confirm that climate change impacts can be very local.
An inflatable boat carries tourists past an iceberg along the Antarctic Peninsula. The peninsula appears to be significantly affected by climate change.
Andrew Halsall/Aurora Expeditions/AP/File
EnlargeSince the early 1990s, glaciers draining Antarctica's vast ice sheets have dumped ice into the ocean at an an eye-popping rate.
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Now, two new studies of ice cores from different parts of the continent are yielding important clues as to why the loss rates have been so high.
On the Antarctic Peninsula, global warming appears to be taking a direct toll. Glaciers are melting mainly from the top down. The peninsula is losing land ice in the summer at a rate unmatched in the past 1,000 years.
For the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, one of two vast continental sheets, losses also have been relatively large. There, however, floating ice shelves that form the seaward end of glaciers are melting from the bottom up. Today's losses are comparable to those that have occurred a few other times over the past 2,000 years. The authors say that for now, the evidence points to the extended reach of naturally shifting climate patterns in the tropical Pacific as driving the losses.
At first blush, the two might appear to be at loggerheads. Instead, researchers suggest, the two highlight how, as on other continents, the intensity of global warming's impact at the bottom of the world depends on location, location, location. And both point to the challenge researchers still face in forecasting the future of the continent's ice chest in a warming climate.
Each in its own way "provides guidance on projecting the future of sea-level rise," notes Richard Alley, a glaciologist at Penn State University in University Park, Pa., who was not a participant in either study.
Researchers have a keen interest in trying to understand and project ice losses in Antarctica, as well as on Greenland, with global warming. Previous studies have shown that since 1992, the loss of ice from polar caps is raising sea levels by an average of about 0.59 millimeters a year.
The West Antarctic Ice Sheet alone could boost sea levels an average of 10 feet if it melts ? an increase that would occur over hundreds to thousands of years, notes Eric Steig, a researcher at the University of Washington who led one of the two research efforts.
Between 1992 and 2011, the peninsula lost ice at rate of 20 billion tons a year, according to a study published last November in the journal Science. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet lost 65 billion tons a year, and the East Antarctic Ice Sheet ? the continent's largest ? lost 14 billion tons a year, although the uncertainties in that number are so large the loss could just as well have been nothing.
Antarctic Peninsula
The Antarctic Peninsula is an extended arm of land that last shook hands with the southern tip of South America roughly 235 million years ago when the two continents drifted apart. It's mountainous and extends into the Southern Ocean to some 250 miles above the Antarctic Circle.
"In some ways, it's a climate oddity," writes Robert Mulvaney, a researcher with the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and a member of the team formally reporting its results on the region's ice Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience, in an e-mail. Relatively warm westerly winds, laden with with ocean moisture, blow across the peninsula. So it tends to be warmer than the mainland and experiences higher snowfall rates.
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