ANTARCTICA GAINS ICE AND PARTIALLY REVERSES LOSS OF PAST DECADE

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Fantastic Dudes and Bots, and weird Science. Welcome to the
Weird Science Facts Podcast. We provide a five minute or
less daily podcast on weird science, debunking myths and old sayings.
So joined Doctor Carlos in this daily diet of fun,

(00:26):
strange and weird world.

Speaker 2 (00:29):
The facts, Well, this seems to contradict what they've been
saying for the last few decades. The anti the Antarctic
ice sheet name mass in a two year course of time,
which was a dramatic reversal from decades of loss. This

(00:50):
is from fox KTVU. The surprising shift is underway at
the bottom of the world of For decades of contributing
to rising sea levels and articles, a massive ice sheet
has started growing again. They studied published and science China
Earth Sciences finds that the Antarctic Ice sheet experienced a
record breaking mass gain between twenty twenty one and twenty

(01:11):
twenty three. The rebrand is especially significant in East Antarctica,
where four major glacier basins had previously shown signs of destabilization.
Researchers from Tong University and other institutions analyzed satellite grab
invatory data from the Grace and Grace fo missions. They
found again that between twenty eleven and twenty twenty, the

(01:31):
AIS was losing ice at a rate of one hundred
and forty two gigatons per year. However, it reversed and
they gained approximately one hundred and eight gigatons per year.
So key glacier basins show the most dramatic shifts. The
most notable games were in East Antarctica's wilkes Land and
Queen Maryland region, including the Taunton Denman, Moscow University, and

(01:54):
Vincennes's Bay glacier basins. These glaciers have been losing mass
and excel rate, but now appear to have partially recovered.
Scientists warned though this doesn't mean the climate crisis is over,
of course, but it's an interesting shift because there are
some scientists that say that these things that we see

(02:16):
a lot, maybe it doesn't have as much to do
with human impact, but more about finding the balance in
nature that we have these moments where we have periods
of high amounts of hurricanes or high frequent or long
periods of warm weather, or for instance, in California, they

(02:37):
have seen patterns where about eight to ten years of
dry weather will lead to all of a sudden, these
huge two or three years of heavy rain that eliminates
the drought. We've seen it happen two or three times
in California, which is fascinating. So it does weather have
a pattern, maybe in the last five hundred one thousand years,
where we can't really measure it because we didn't have

(02:59):
those instruments for the last thousand years. But maybe it
does have a pattern. I'm not saying that humans don't contribute.
Maybe it exacerbates the pattern, maybe it delays it or
lengthens it, who knows, but maybe there is a pattern
in them. The weather