Recent studies shows that the Arctic and Antarctic have cooled over the past 2 decades, and that ice mass has gained in the Antarctic Wilkes Land-Queen Mary Land region.
Hat-tip: TKP
The study, “Spatiotemporal mass change rate analysis from 2002 to 2023 over the Antarctic Ice Sheet and four glacier basins in Wilkes-Queen Mary Land” in the journal Science China Earth Sciences authored by Wei Wang et al looked at the AIS mass change series from April 2002 to December 2023 with the focus on four glacier basins in the Wilkes Land-Queen Mary Land (WL-QML) region: Denman, Moscow, Totten, and Vincennes Bay glacier basins.
Chart source: TKP
Recent ice mass growth
In the period of 2002-2010, there was moderate ice loss of -73.79 ± 56.27 gigatons per year, which contributed to 0.20 ± 0.16 mm per year to global sea level rise.
From 2011-2020 there was almost twice as much ice loss of -142.06 ± 56.12 gigatons per year, contributing 0.39 ± 0.15 mm per year to global sea level rise.
But in the period of 2021-2023, there was a surprising a mass gain of 107.79 ± 74.90 gigatons per year that offset global sea level rise by 0.30 ± 0.21 mm per year.
Cooling at rate of 5°C per century since early 1980s
In a study published in 2023, “Significant West Antarctic Cooling in the Past Two Decades Driven by Tropical Pacific Forcing”, authored by Xueying Zhang et al, analyses showed that the West Antarctic cooled over the past 2 decades: “In particular, during 1999–2018, the observed annual average surface air temperature had decreased at a statistically significant rate, with the strongest cooling in austral spring.”
The results show that most of the Antarctic continent has cooled by 2 °C since the early 1980s. That translates into a rate of 5°C per century.
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May 7, 2025 at 12:13PM
Iowa Climate Science Education 