Antarctica Ice Growing Across Large Areas for at Least 85 Years, Aerial Photos Show

From THE DAILY SCEPTIC

by Chris Morrison

Sensational new discoveries arising from long-forgotten early aerial photographs indicate that ice has remained stable and even grown slightly since the 1930s over a 2,000 km stretch of East Antarctica. In a recent paper published in Nature Communications, researchers from the University of Copenhagen came to their conclusions by tracking glacial movement in an area with as much ice as the Greenland ice sheet. The findings are unlikely to feature in narrative-driven mainstream media. The silence will probably replicate the response to another recent paper that found the ice shelves surrounding Antarctica grew in overall size from 2009-2019.

The Copenhagen scientists examined hundreds of old aerial photographs taken for mapping work in 1937. The images were supplemented with a number of photographs taken in the 1950s and 1974 of the same area and a 3D computer reconstruction was produced. This allowed the researchers to examine the evolution of glaciers over a significant time period. In order to determine if recent trends exceed the scale of natural variability, long-term observations are said to be vital.

“Compared to modern data, the ice flow speeds are unchanged. While some glaciers have thinned over shorter intermediate periods of 10-20 years, they have remained stable or grown slightly in the long term, indicating a system in balance,” it was noted.

Actual long-term scientific observations will always beat media-friendly computer-modelled pseudoscientific opinions and alarm drummed up by short-term outliers. The authors note that using data from historical sources such as early photographs provides extensive coverage across large areas with detailed temporal and three-dimensional information. Geological evidence covers longer time scales with temporal uncertainties of thousands of years, while estimates from ice cores are generally very local and spatially confined. In Antarctica, it is pointed out, the scarcity of historical climate data makes climate reanalysis estimates before 1970 “largely uncertain”, while “observed trends cannot clearly be distinguished from natural variability”. Not that this stops mainstream activists such as Clive Cookson at the Financial Times who reacted to a recent two-year downward spike in Antarctica sea ice with the suggestion that the area faced a “catastrophic cascade of extreme environmental events… that will affect the climate around the world”.

Of course a “system in balance” is the last thing a Net Zero-obsessed mainstream wants to hear about. The Antarctica Circumpolar Current is the strongest flow of water on the planet and on March 4th the BBC brought news that it was “at risk of failing”. New research is said to suggest that the current will be 20% slower within 25 years “as the world warms, with far reaching consequences for life on Earth”.

Fresh ice melt water  is said to cause major changes in the density structure of the ocean, leading to a projected slowdown of the current. Inexplicably, the BBC report failed to note that the prediction was generated by a computer model which had been loaded with a ‘pathway’ that assumed global temperatures would rise up to 4°C within less than 80 years. The clickbait-searching scientists behind the findings observed the recent rapidly declining sea ice in Antarctica, but failed to report a more recent recovery. At the end of 2024, the extent of sea ice was roughly the same as the 1981 to 2010 average. According to the US-based National Snow and Ice Data Centre, “this provides a sharp illustration of the high variability of Antarctica sea ice extent”. And recent examination of earlier photographic evidence provides more insights, with early Nimbus weather satellite images revealing that the 2023 decline was similar to that seen in 1966.

Regular readers of the Daily Sceptic will of course be aware that Antarctica is a difficult place to whip up climate panic, although it must be conceded that mainstream science and media have spared little effort in attempting to do so. Over the last seven decades there has been little or no warming over large areas of the continent. What warming there has been, on the west side, is directly on top of a large number of volcanoes. A recent paper from Singh and Polvani found that Antarctica sea ice “has modestly expanded, a finding that seems to confirm the work on the ice shelf increases between 2009-2019. Warming has been “nearly non-existent” over 70 years, state Singh and Polvani. According to NASA figures, the ice loss is 0.0005% a year. As an example of how humans cause the climate to warm by burning hydrocarbons and eating meat, Antarctica leaves a lot to be desired.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.