http://members.boardhost.com/hurricanecity/msg/48739.htmlA study infact done in good ole Missouri Mizzou shows the ice sheet in Antartica is getting thicker. The northeast has had below normal temps this year.
The eastern half of Antarctica is gaining weight, more than 45 billion tonnes a year, according to a new scientific study.
Data from satellites bouncing radar signals off the ground show that the surface of eastern Antarctica appears to be slowly growing higher, by about 1.8 centimeters a year, as snow and ice pile up.
The gain in eastern Antarctica snow partly offsets the rise in sea level caused by the melting of ice and snow in other parts of the world. The finding also matches expectations that the earth's warming temperatures would increase the amount of moisture in the air and lead to greater snowfall over Antarctica.
"It's been long predicted by climate models,"said Curt H Davis, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Missouri and the lead author of a paper that was published on the website of the journal Science. "This is the first observational evidence."
The accumulation occurring across 2.75 million square miles of eastern Antarctica corresponds to a gain of 45 billion tons of water a year or, equivalently, the removal of the top 0.12 mm of the world's oceans.
The data, from two European Space Agency satellites, cover 1992 to 2003, but because the satellites do not pass directly over the South Pole, they did not provide any information for a 1,150-mile-wide circular area around the pole.