Word from Antarctica is that the East Antarctic Ice Sheet has increased in mass each year in the past decade.
But don’t worry, environmentalists, some scientists have already blamed this, too, on global warming.
“As the atmosphere warms, it should hold more moisture,” said climatologist Joseph R. McConnell at the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nev., who helped conduct the study. “In East Antarctica, that means there should be more snowfall.”
The additional snowfall is enough to account for an extra 45 billion tons of water added to the ice sheet every year, just about equal to the annual amount of water flowing into the ocean from the melting Greenland ice cap, the scientists reported in research published online Thursday by the journal Science.
If anything, state lawmakers can no longer fear the state being “stripped of the slender bracelet of the Outer Banks, its eastern farm fields turned to steamy coastland regularly battered by vicious storms.”
