A recent study conducted by NASA shows that while the size of Arctic had shrunken over the years, the size of Antarctica has grown and not affected by global warming.
Global warming doesn't seem to be all the "global" after all. A recent study conducted by researchers from NASA have found that from "1978 to 2010 the total extent of sea ice surrounding Antarctica in the Southern Ocean grew by roughly 6,600 square miles every year, an area larger than the state of Connecticut."
"There's been an overall increase in the sea ice cover in the Antarctic, which is the opposite of what is happening in the Arctic," said lead author Claire Parkinson, a climate scientist with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. "However, this growth rate is not nearly as large as the decrease in the Arctic."
Explaining this phenomenon, Parkinson said that climate is not uniform everywhere and this could be the reason why global warming has not affected the Antarctica Ocean.
"Climate does not change uniformly: The Earth is very large and the expectation definitely would be that there would be different changes in different regions of the world," Parkinson said. "That's true even if overall the system is warming."
Another recent NASA study showed that Antarctic sea ice slightly thinned from 2003 to 2008, but increases in the extent of the ice balanced the loss in thickness and led to an overall volume gain. It was also found that the ice covering the ocean has been comparatively thinner from 2003 to 2008.
"We have a good handle of the extent of the Antarctic sea ice, but the thickness has been the missing piece to monitor the sea ice mass balance," said Thorsten Markus, one of the authors of the study and Project Scientist for ICESat-2, a satellite mission designed to replace the now defunct ICESat. ICESat-2 is scheduled to launch in 2016. "The extent can be greater, but if the sea ice gets thinner, the volume could stay the same."
