Is polar ice shrinking, growing or both?

Researchers think the thick layer of ice and snow on the western part of the Antarctic, which extends to the southern Polar Sea, may be slowly growing.

But according to the journal Science, they may have simply placed their measuring instruments at a time where the ice began to re-form after a 10,000-year melting cycle. That’s because, another group of scientists has reported in Science gigantic icebergs are breaking away from that very same western Antarctic ice shelf.

“It is actually quite difficult to determine what is happening to the climate,” Jorgen Peter Steffensen from the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark told the Danish newspaper, Politiken.

Steffensen is one of the field directors of the North Greenland Ice-core project, known as GRIP. This project is extracting ice cores from Greenland’s glaciers to learn about past climatic conditions.

The institute is also participating in a similar project on the eastern Antarctic plateau to drill down to 190,000-year-old ice. At that time, it was 10 C colder in Antarctica than it is today.

Steffensen said ice-cores in Greenland show the climate can change drastically, even from one day to the next. This kind of cataclysmic event, called “Event One,” can abruptly change a climate and cause wild temperature swings.

“Intense climate changes can occur within a generation,” Steffensen said.

But he said conflicting evidence and effects makes it hard to see what is happening. For example, Norway has become warmer, but receives more snowfall, while in Greenland, it looks as if the ice is shrinking on the one side of the island and expanding on the other.