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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: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 17 2019, @10:11AM (3 children)
No, it really does not take intellegence to comprehend this. Go measure something to the nearest tenth of a mm. Then do it again.Then think about if it was a moving liquid and you were measuring it while moving thousands of miles an hour from 6 km away, then that a couple of times in the middle of the measurement you had to switch to a completely new tool.
It is totally unbelievable. It takes zero smarts to understand.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 17 2019, @10:19AM
And oh yea, due to multiple overlapping cycles the "true" value is fluctuating by tens, hundreds or even thousands of mm periodically as well.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday January 17 2019, @06:54PM (1 child)
It's called an average. Maybe you should look into that, and other basic math skills, before posting?
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 17 2019, @07:22PM
Yea, this does look like what a naive use of averages would result in:
> mean(c(5.2,6.7,5.6,5.5,5.9, 6.5, 8.2))
[1] 6.228571
Wow, I could only measure to the tenth of a meter but now all of a sudden I know the average value to an accuracy of a micron, the size of a single bacterium. Isn't it amazing???