Alarming reviews that the Antarctic ice sheet is shrinking misrepresent the science beneath strategy to perceive a really complicated scenario. Antarctica has been ice-covered for no less than 30 million years. The ice sheet holds about 26.5 million gigatons of water (a gigaton is a billion metric tons, or about 2.2 trillion kilos). If it had been to soften utterly, sea ranges would rise 190 ft. Such a change is many millennia sooner or later, if it comes in any respect.
Far more modest ice loss is regular in Antarctica. Annually, some 2,200 gigatons (or 0.01%) of the ice is discharged within the type of soften and icebergs, whereas snowfall provides virtually the identical quantity. The distinction between the discharge and addition every year is the ice sheet’s annual loss. That determine has been rising in current many years, from 40 gigatons a 12 months within the Nineteen Eighties to 250 gigatons a 12 months within the 2010s.
