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Submitted via IRC for Bytram
For this study, [lead author Eric] Rignot and his collaborators conducted what he called the longest-ever assessment of remaining Antarctic ice mass. Spanning four decades, the project was also geographically comprehensive; the research team examined 18 regions encompassing 176 basins, as well as surrounding islands.
[...] The team was able to discern that between 1979 and 1990, Antarctica shed an average of 40 gigatons of ice mass annually. (A gigaton is 1 billion tons.) From 2009 to 2017, about 252 gigatons per year were lost.
The pace of melting rose dramatically over the four-decade period. From 1979 to 2001, it was an average of 48 gigatons annually per decade. The rate jumped 280 percent to 134 gigatons for 2001 to 2017.
Four decades of Antarctic Ice Sheet mass balance from 1979–2017 (open, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1812883116)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 17 2019, @08:37AM (1 child)
You're worried about the wrong thing, check how they got the numbers. I was going to make a post but got too lazy (really who cares at this point?). But as is usual it's a chain of byzantine procedures for combining disparate noisy and spotty data combined with the most simplistic asessment of the error/uncertainty imaginable (eg the square root of number of months...). Somehow that spits out the impossibly precise numbers at the end. It's called uncertainty laundering.
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 17 2019, @09:24AM
As usual, encouraging people to look at the methodology is modded troll. Dont mind the black box that generates all these conclusions, nothing interesting there.