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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 17 2019, @05:38PM
I already shared a link above that describes the issues with everything you just wrote. It is in fact not simple at all to do any of those things and (unsurprisingly to anyone who is familiar with data collection) require all sorts of adjustments and approximations and data cleaning.