Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Antarctic ice sheet" in English language version.
The data show that one relatively small area called the Antarctic Peninsula is melting and calving huge icebergs. That's what gets reported year after year. But the continent as a whole is getting colder, and the ice is getting thicker.First Edition
The IPCC doesn't make projections about which of these scenarios is more likely, but other researchers and modellers can. The Australian Academy of Science, for instance, released a report last year stating that our current emissions trajectory had us headed for a 3 °C warmer world, roughly in line with the middle scenario. Climate Action Tracker predicts 2.5 to 2.9 °C of warming based on current policies and action, with pledges and government agreements taking this to 2.13 °C.
Medium-range estimates of Arctic carbon emissions could result from moderate climate emission mitigation policies that keep global warming below 3 °C (e.g., RCP4.5). This global warming level most closely matches country emissions reduction pledges made for the Paris Climate Agreement...
Although their methods of interpolation or extrapolation for areas with unobserved output velocities have an insufficient description for the evaluation of associated errors, such errors in previous results (Rignot and others, 2008) caused large overestimates of the mass losses as detailed in Zwally and Giovinetto (Zwally and Giovinetto, 2011).
Medium-range estimates of Arctic carbon emissions could result from moderate climate emission mitigation policies that keep global warming below 3 °C (e.g., RCP4.5). This global warming level most closely matches country emissions reduction pledges made for the Paris Climate Agreement...
Although their methods of interpolation or extrapolation for areas with unobserved output velocities have an insufficient description for the evaluation of associated errors, such errors in previous results (Rignot and others, 2008) caused large overestimates of the mass losses as detailed in Zwally and Giovinetto (Zwally and Giovinetto, 2011).
Antarctica is divided into the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, East Antarctic Ice Sheet and Antarctic Peninsula based on historical definitions plus information from modern-day DEM and ice velocity data.
Since 2009, NASA's mission Operation IceBridge (OIB) has flown aircraft over the Antarctic Ice Sheet carrying laser and ice-penetrating radar instruments to collect data about the surface height, bedrock topography and ice thickness.
Our definitions of the West Antarctic ice sheet (systems 18-23 and 1), the East Antarctic ice sheet (systems 2-17), and the Antarctic Peninsula (systems 24-27) allocate the drainage systems according to ice provenance with separation of East and West Antarctica approximately along the Transantarctic Mountains.
At first glance this seems to contradict the idea of 'global' warming, but one needs to be careful before jumping to this conclusion. A rise in the global mean temperature does not imply universal warming. Dynamical effects (changes in the winds and ocean circulation) can have just as large an impact, locally as the radiative forcing from greenhouse gases. The temperature change in any particular region will in fact be a combination of radiation-related changes (through greenhouse gases, aerosols, ozone and the like) and dynamical effects. Since the winds tend to only move heat from one place to another, their impact will tend to cancel out in the global mean.
