Melting

The five warmest years since 1880 have taken place since 2010 so at some point the Antarctic will really start melting and that point is getting closer:

Antarctica, the planet’s largest ice sheet, lost 219 billion tons of ice annually from 2012 through 2017 – approximately triple the 73 billion ton melt rate of a decade ago, the scientists concluded. From 1992 through 1997, Antarctica lost 49 billion tons of ice annually.

…

Finally, the largest part of the continent, East Antarctica, has remained more stable and didn’t contribute much ice to the ocean during the period of study, the assessment says. However, in the last five years, it too has begun to lose ice, perhaps as much as 28 billion tons per year, although the uncertainty surrounding this number remains high.

Good thing it’s all a hoax according to Trump.

Goodbye ice

The amount of ice in the Antarctic has actually been increasing so everything’s cool right? Well:

Sea ice increases in Antarctica do not make up for the accelerated Arctic sea ice loss of the last decades, a new NASA study finds. As a whole, the planet has been shedding sea ice at an average annual rate of 13,500 square miles (35,000 square kilometers) since 1979, the equivalent of losing an area of sea ice larger than the state of Maryland every year.

At least it’s not getting worse. Oh:

Furthermore, the global ice decrease has accelerated: in the first half of the record (1979-96), the sea ice loss was about 8,300 square miles (21,500 square kilometers) per year. This rate more than doubled for the second half of the period (1996 to 2013), when there was an average loss of 19,500 square miles (50,500 square kilometers) per year – an average yearly loss larger than the states of Vermont and New Hampshire combined.

But there’s been a lot of snow in Boston

The third major storm in the past two weeks shattered a longstanding snowfall record in Boston, bringing the staggering total over a 30-day span to about 6 feet. That topped the old mark, 58.8 inches, set in 1978. Since the latest storm began Saturday, Boston has received almost 22 inches.

The Antarctic and a poem

Since links are a bit of a pain right now, here’s a link-free post. First a picture of the Transarctic mountain glacier taken from a DC8 as part of NASA’s attempt to completely map the Arctic and Antarctic ice (Credit: NASA/Sarah DeWitt):

and the usual Friday poem:

I live under
A mistaken expression
Live life.