“The planet as a whole is doing what was expected in terms of warming. Sea ice as a whole is decreasing as expected, but just like with global warming, not every location with sea ice will have a downward trend in ice extent.” This revelation was contained in a press release released by Claire Parkinson of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
This according to NASA reveals that sea ice in the Antarctic region and the southern oceans surrounding the parts is rising and has reached record levels, and even though the Arctic has lost about 20,800 square miles of ice per year, the Antarctic has gained about 7,300 square miles of ice since the agency started tracking the phenomenon since 1979.
To underscore the rising trend, the National Snow and Ice Data Center states that the Antarctic sea ice exceeded 7.72 million square miles on September 19 for the first time, and it reached 7.78 million square miles on September 20 – the first of its record since tracking started since the early 1970s. However, the average that had been recorded before this time, between 1981 and 2010 was 7.23 million square miles – which translates to 18.72 million square kilometers.
Scientists have warned that the changing weather patterns occasioned by climate change is the reason for the rising and decreasing ocean ice levels, and this underscores the effect of global warming on the environment.
A research scientist at Goddard, Walt Meier, states that “Some people have looked at the Antarctic increasing trend and use that to suggest that global warming isn’t happening, or that the increase in the Antarctic is offsetting the decrease in the Arctic and that’s simply not true. If you look at the magnitudes of the changes we’re seeing in the wintertime, the Arctic is decreasing about twice as fast as the Antarctic is increasing.”