Is Antarctic ice really melting?

I'm not sure which planet 'Blame Bush' is on, but on this planet there are no polar bears in the Antarctic.

Sea Ice does melt each southern summer, But glaciers flow just from the sheer mass of ice several kilometers thick, regardless of the temperature. Glaciers reach the coast and flow out into the sea glaciers basically melt from the bottom the same thing in smaller scale is what happens to icebergs it is not the air temp but the water temp that does most of the melting.

Your 'world climate report' link has a number of problems it is a well known denier site, it is well out of date (2006) and it continues the denier trend to some how link the movie "Day After Tomorrow" to climate change, newsflash that is a fictional movie.

some scientist believe that the ice in the south pole, is actually advancing and not to long ago a piece of ice the size of Manhattan broke off the antarctic but, what they forgot to mention was that the likely reason was because there was an earthquake

just for fun

Lets do an experiment, get a cup, put one cup of water and add a ice cube. Measure how much the water rose

now with a different cup ,add one cup of water and add the same amount of water used to make the first ice cube. measure it. Notice how they have the same measurement?

If you want to now why some place in the world seem to be sinking, read about plate tectonics

1. There are NO polar bears in the Antarctic. There are NO penguins in the Arctic. The only place penguins and polar nears inhabit the same place is in a Coca Cola commercial.

2. Eastern Antarctic is growing ice pack and the West Antarctic is calving ice into the western (Pacific) ocean. I would be very surprised if that melting had absolutely any relation to "global warming". It is more likely that the melting is related to the Western Coast of South America, which is tectonically very active and almost certainly has a greater heat flow than the East Antarctic because of the proximity to the Western subduction zone.

3. Glaciers move by building snow mass in their centre and "creeping" through compaction and weight of the central mass, which causes expansion of the unconfined edges (read the seaward edge of the glacial mass).

4. The ocean and Antarctic sea mass provides NO significant "confining pressure" or seaward stress field, with which to inhibit seaward creep of the glacial mass. It is like saying that the edges of the pie dough provide confining pressure to the flattening pie "crust" as you roll the dough out by adding pressure and rolling the centre. There may actually be a slight amount of confining pressure on the west Antarctic which is set up by the sporadic land protrusions between the Antarctic and South America. This in fact might explain the long linear ridges seen on the Ross Ice Shelf as it calves. These may really be compression fractures related to a minimal confining pressure.

5. Showing pictures of calving glaciers as they hit the warmer oceans is a lot like showing live birth and saying eeeeeeeeewwwwwww! It is what glaciers do when they meet ocean water that is warm in comparison to the ice sheet. If they didn't, then the glacier would rapidly cover most of the Southern Hemisphere. It is all perfectly natural! (It makes for real scary Global Warming documentaries tho!!)

To the guy that tried to "explain" Specific Heat to me. I actually sincerely do appreciate the effort and I certainly accept and understand your points. They are absolutely true and valid! I was referring to not only the skewed polar heating i.e. N vs S Hem; I was talking of the skewness within the North Hemisphere. I mentioned N of 60 degrees. I have a tough time explaining it. Also, I am trained to examine data in its raw form. Although I thank you for the link to IPCC, I would classify that as interpreted data. The variations and discrepancies were much easier to see in IR IPCC 2007 SYR Fig. 6-b. The Temp discrepancy looks like a whole bunch more than 15% !!

To the guy that thought that I conflated Magnetic Field with Axial Tilt. You simply missed the point. Of course they are independent! I was simply giving plausible alternate explanations and my initial reactions as to possible alternates. Your description of the Earth Configuration is out of a Geology 101 text book. The explanation that I gave is far more precise than perhaps you are capable of understanding!.

You're right!

In most of Eastern Antarctica, temperatures are way too low for significant melting to take place. In fact, warming is leading to increased water vapour, which means more snowfall. East Antarctica is growing.

West Antarctica is warming and shrinking, confirmed by satellite measurements of its gravitational field:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleUR...

To understand this it helps to use statistical physics. You know that puddles evaporate, even though the temperature isn't 100C+ at the surface of the Earth - statistical physics helps explain this by modeling how energy isn't evenly distributed in a system:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%E2%80%93Boltz...

This isn't as applicable for a solid like ice (statistical mechanics assumes 'weakly interacting particles'), but it helps you understand how you can get some melting below 0C, and some evaporation below 100C.

Here's some computer model projections for total sea level rise. You can see that East Antarctica is taking up water and growing. West Antarctica is slightly shrinking - most of the growth comes from thermal expansion & glaciers, but Greenland contributes too. The Arctic, which is nearly all sea ice, doesn't contribute.

http://www.geology.iastate.edu/gcp/sealevel/images...

At first @ Blame Bush: It is the southern hemisphere the question is about, not the northern. In the north you have a massive loss of ice, this winter the lowest amount of ice ever since historical times recorded in this area (read carefully, i wrote amount, not extent, sea ice extent is near average now, but it is very thin ice).

Sea ice round Antarctica is growing.

You have to read the real sources to know what is going on in Antarctica.

It is totally clear that Antarcticas Ice shield is not melting at all. Every scientist working on that field knows this pretty well.

It is not sea ice that is melting either. This may sound a little paradox, because it is true that Antarctica is loosing ice.

So what the h.... is happening down there?

Look carefully at this continent. Very cold on land, but rather warm in the surroundings. There are free oceans with warm (still cold, but well above 0) currents towards the coasts. There are glaciers streaming into the sea, building up huge ice shelves in front of the coastline, these are effective brakes for the glaciers which are building up to heights of more than 3000 m.

These ice shelves are melting away from below, due to warming of the deep ocean currents. This has already caused the vanishing of 10 minor shelves, the latest under disintegration, the Wilkins ice shelf, which retreated during antarctic winter too, and that is really fantastic.

Now you must have a look on the meltwater from these shelves. It is streaming towards the surface and there you have a circumpolar current, transporting this water with lower amount of salt in it (and so a higher freezing point too) round the continent. This prevents the warmer deep water to get to the surface......and sea ice is growing.

There you have the paradoxon. Sea ice is growing because it is warmer..........because there is more melting several hundred meters down.

And there is one more point to look at. The velocity of the glaciers down to the sea has increased with up to factor 12 in areas where the iceshelves have vanished, and that is the main cause why Antarctica is loosing ice. It is not melting on the continent, it is floating downwards to the sea, calving and melting there.

If you want to know more, do not look at newspapers, read the sources.

In truth Antartica is always below 0 centigrade and thus ice there never melts on land. Sea ice can melt from warm currents as happens anywhere.

Apparently Antarctic ice is not really melting at all!

Good show , All that garbage which is causing Global Warming is part of the scam so the Gov could charge U tax for breathing.

Yes it is!!! You should watch that Al Gore documentary!

You fools. Of course it is. Look at the shipping channels, the sattelite photos and polar bears!