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Misleading Reports
About Antarctic Melting
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Most articles make it sound as if all of Here’s a map of
The Antarctic continent is almost 50 times larger than the Antarctic Peninsula.
Saying that all of
* * * Here's one of the articles that I'm talking about, from the AP in London (April 21, 2005) that would have you believe that Antarctica is melting. The headline shouts, "Study Shows Antarctic Glaciers Shrinking." I think this is another case of biased science and biased reporting, because what I consider the important points are buried further down in the text. The article could more honestly have shouted, “Most of Antarctica far colder than the much smaller Antarctic Peninsula” Here are the first few paragraphs of the article, written by Emma Ross. I've highlighted what I consider to be important points. _____________ "The
first comprehensive survey of glaciers on the Antarctic peninsula has shown that the rivers of ice are shrinking, mostly because of warming of the local
climate. "It is unclear,
however, whether the increased temperature causing the shrinkage is a natural regional effect
or a result of human-influenced global warming, said the scientists who conducted the study, published this week in the journal
Science. "Researchers
from the British Antarctic Survey and the U.S. Geological Survey analyzed more than 2,000 aerial photographs dating from 1940 and over 100 satellite images from the 1960s onwards. "They
calculated that 87 percent of the 244 glaciers going out to sea from the peninsula have retreated over the last 50 years and that the pace of shrinkage has accelerated over the last decade. Until now, scientists were uncertain whether the glaciers were growing or melting. "Fifty
years ago, most of the glaciers we look at were slowly growing in length but since then this pattern has reversed. In the last five years
the majority were actually shrinking rapidly," said the study's leader, Alison Cook of the British Antarctic Survey. "However, 32 glaciers go
against the trend and are showing minor advance. Had we not studied such a large number of glaciers we may have missed the overall pattern." "The
Antarctic peninsula is a small segment of the Antarctic continent, located at the South Pole, and the behavior of the
ice on the peninsula is not necessarily a reflection of what's going on elsewhere in Antarctica, said another of the investigators, David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey. "Temperatures seem to be much warmer there than on the rest of the continent. "Evidence from the main Antarctic ice sheet is mixed, with some areas of the continent showing shrinkage and others showing thickening." To
see the rest of the article, click here: So
. . . why is the Antarctic Peninsula so warm? I think it's because it's ____________________ According to a report in Science (Jan 2002), new measurements show that the ice in parts of Antarctica is thickening. One week earlier, an article in Nature reported that Antarctica's harsh desert valleys - long considered a bellwether for global climate change - have grown noticeably cooler since the mid-1980s.To put this in perspective, you must realize that the Antarctic Ice Sheet and Greenland Ice Sheets are almost twice as big as the contiguous United States. They're almost 100 times bigger than all of the rest of the world's glaciers put together. In other words, more than 99 percent of the world's glaciers are growing ... and all we hear about are the few that are melting. And
that's why sea levels are falling. That's where the water
comes from to
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