Global warming paradox: More sea ice around Antarctica in winter, study says

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  Sinead Farrell / NASAIce floes are shown at the foot of an iceberg in Antarctica's Amundsen Sea in October 2010.By Alister Doyle, ReutersOSLO, Norway -  Global warming is expanding the extent of sea ice around Antarctica in winter in  a paradoxical shift caused by cold plumes of summer melt water that re-freeze  fast when temperatures drop, according to a study unveiled Sunday.

Follow @NBCNewsWorld  An increasing  summer thaw of ice on the edges of Antarctica, twinned with less than expected  snowfall on the frozen continent, is also adding slightly to sea level rise in a  threat to low-lying areas around the world, it said.

Climate scientists  have been struggling to explain why sea ice around Antarctica has been growing,  reaching a record extent in the winter of 2010, when ice on the Arctic Ocean at  the other end of the planet shrank to a record low in 2012.


"Sea ice  around Antarctica is increasing despite the warming global climate," said  Richard Bintanja, lead author of the study at the Royal Netherlands  Meteorological Institute.

"This is caused by melting of the ice sheets  from below," he told Reuters of the findings in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Ice is made of fresh water and, when ice shelves on the fringes of  Antarctica thaw in summer because of upwellings of warming sea water, the  meltwater forms a cool layer that floats on the denser, warmer salty sea water  below, the study said.

In winter, the melt water readily turns to ice  because it freezes at zero degrees Celsius, above sea water at -2C (28.4F).

At a winter maximum in September, ice on the sea around Antarctica  covers about 19 million sq kms (7.3 million sq miles), bigger than Antarctica's  land area. It then melts away into the ocean as summer approaches.

Among other scientists, Paul Holland of the British  Antarctic Survey stuck to his findings last year that a shift in winds linked to  climate change was blowing a layer of melt water further out to sea and adding  to winter ice.

"The possibility remains that the real increase is the  sum of wind-driven and melt water-driven effects, of course. That would be my  best guess, with the melt water effect being the smaller of the two," he said.

Bintanja's study also said the cool melt water layer may limit the  amount of water sucked from the oceans that falls as snow on Antarctica. Cold  air can hold less moisture than warm.

"Cool sea surface temperatures  around Antarctica could offset projected snowfall increases in Antarctica, with  implications for estimates of future sea-level rise," it said.

The U.N.  panel of climate scientists has estimated that sea levels will rise by between  18 and 59 cm (7-24 inches) this century, more if thaws of Antarctica and  Greenland accelerate.

The panel's main scenarios assume that Antarctica  alone will make sea levels fall by between 2 and 14 cms this century because  more snowfall will extract water from the sea.

But Sunday's study said  that Antarctica was losing about 250 billion tonnes of ice a year - equivalent  to 0.07 millimetre(0.003 inch) of sea level rise a year, Bintanja said.  "Antarctic mass loss seems to be accelerating," it said.

Another study  in Nature Geoscience said Antarctica's snowfall had been over-estimated by  between 11 and 36.5 billion tonnes a year because of fierce winds blasting many  regions.

Strong winds created conditions to "sublimate" snow, or make it  pass from a frozen state to a gas without first becoming liquid, a U.S.-led team  wrote.

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