More specifically, there are 34 ice shelves attached to Antarctica. Of these, 18 have been retreating. However, 16 of them having been growing, and two of those are the size of nations. Antarctica is 5.5 MILLION square miles in size. This means that it's 21 times LARGER than Texas and 134 times LARGER than the State of Ohio. In fact, it's 4.25 times LARGER than India.
Plus, West Antarctica includes the Antarctic Peninsula which happens to NOT be within the Antarctic Polar Circle. That peninsula is closer to Argentina than it is to the South Pole. This means that it is not the End of the World when its summertime temperatures go above freezing, into 45F, and even into 65F.
The 2009 to 2019 Antarctic surface mass balance gain of 661 gigatons was due to Eastern Antarctic ice gain which includes the two largest ice shelves in the continent. Both of those ice shelves are actually attached to West Antarctica and to East Antarctica. But, their ice gains are not counted as West Antarctic ice gains; only as East Antarctic ones.
None the less, one of those East Antarctic ice shelves is the size of Spain (The Ross Ice Shelf). The other one is the size of California. In fact, it's 16,000 square miles LARGER than Montana. (The Filche-Ronne Shelf ). The net of ice gained in Antarctica, from 2009 to 2019, was 2,048 sq miles.
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See: (European Geosciences Union, Volume 17 / issue 5 / TC, 17, 2059-2072, 2023 / May 16, 2023.)
[Andreasen, J. R., Hogg, A. E., and Selley, H. L.: Change in Antarctic ice shelf area from 2009 to 2019, The Cryosphere, 17, 2059–2072, https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-17-2059-2023, 2023.]
Important ====> https://tc.copernicus.org/articles/17/2059/2023/?mc_cid=7a3485fd02
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At this point, it's important to note that ...
[1] ... in 2015, Antarctica had its LARGEST sea ice extent in recorded history.
[2] ... and the bottom of the massive Ross Ice Shelf was found to be crystalized, and NOT melting.
[3] Moreover, Antarctica had its coldest recorded Winter in the Year 2021.
In conclusion, for a person to claim that Antarctica is massively loosing ice is to contradict scientifically observed reality.
The Year 2019, another year of super hysteria
In the Year 2019, after the massive Antarctic ice gain of ten years, an individual without any kind of Ph.d claimed that the Ross Ice Shelf & elsewhere were massively losing so much ice that the melted ice was going into the Southern Ocean and creating a disaster to soon come upon humanity. She asserted that Antarctica will melt to the point of soon creating a global sea level rise of 23 feet.
Then the assertion suddenly changed to a sea level rise of 38 feet, all because of runaway Antarctic ice shelves and glaciers sliding into the Southern Ocean. Then, the averment morphed into another change, where it was claimed that today's state of Antarctica will cause a global sea level rise of 45 feet. And we are supposed to take people as idiotic as her seriously.
Antarctic ice shelves are already deeply within water. In fact, concerning the northern top of Planet Earth, if all the ice on the Arctic Ocean (surrounding the NORTH POLE) were to melt tomorrow, there would be no sea level rise. It's the same science as when all of the ice cubes in your ice tea glass melts. The melted ice cubes don't cause the tea glass to overflow.
Being that the Antarctic ice shelves are already mostly submerged into the ocean, when a 15 mile-long piece of the Filche-Ronne Ice Shelf broke-off in 2019, Scientific America stated:
"Because the ice shelf that this berg calved from was already floating on water, the event won't directly impact sea levels." (Note: It's only correct to state, "already floating deeply within sea water." But of course, today's scientists see how much money one can deceptively con out of Congressional members who seek re-election votes and who know that the average American voter is simply misinformed when the average voter is not being kept uninformed.)
The hysteric 2019 article then stated that it will cause Antarctic glaciers to slide into the Southern Ocean and create global sea level rise. The claim was that the relatively minor piece of ice shelf was catching all glaciers up to the time of dislocating itself from the super-massive ice shelf. The truth is that the inland glaciers become part of the ice shelves, themselves. So, for any one glacier to fall into the Southern Ocean and cause Florida tourists to move their lounge chairs & sun tan lotion bottles five feet inland, that glacier needs to take a number, just like customers at an American bakery, waiting to be served.
Now, the Filche-Ronne Ice Shelf is bigger than Montana. How long will it take an inland glacier to slide across a plain of ice the size of Montana and fall into the ocean? Yes, the ice shelves breathe, in that their sizes change according to the season ... as in Summer and Winter. But, glaciers first become the ice shelf itself, and every ice shelf is like an iceberg. The vast majority of each ice shelf is mostly underwater, already.
This type of hysteria has been ongoing since June of 1988, when Jim Hansen made his doomsday predictions in front of a few United States senators. Yet, Saint Augustine Florida, the oldest city in the United States, is still NOT underwater, as of 2023.
All in all, if the world comes to an end in the next ten years, it will do so by either [1] Nuclear Winter, [2] or a wave of meteoroid landings on Planet Earth, likened to the 1913 Tunguska Event, or an [3] an unexpected plague. Even another Carrington Event (1859) wouldn't end life on Planet Earth. However, it will have tragic consequences, resulting in human suffering squared and cubed ... and even hysteric warfare, where man turns into an animal.
The confidently stated assertion by climate doomsayers is that Antarctica keeps losing gigatons of ice.
In review:
It was found that, between 2009 and 2019, sixteen of the 34 ice shelves of Antarctica were growing enough to produce a surface mass balance gain (an increase of ice) amounting to positive 661 Gigatons.
It was found that East Antarctica's ice shelves let Antarctica grow another 5,305 square kilometers in ice, despite the 18 ice shelves in the West of Antarctica and on its peninsula which were retreating. This translates into an aggregate ice growth of 2,048 square miles.
Keep in mind that Antarctica's peninsula is outside of the Polar Circle of the Southern Hemisphere. Thus, summertime temperatures above freezing there are not a sign of the End of the World. In fact, the Antarctic Peninsula is closer to Argentina than it is to the South Pole. This is understandable when you take into account the reality that Antarctica is 5.5 MILLION square miles wide. It's the exact same size as the Arctic Ocean, on the other side of Planet Earth. This brings the rationally minded person to a question: Why is the South Pole all ice-covered terrain, while the North Pole is all ice-covered water the exact same size as Antarctica? ... that is, why, in addition to the centipedal force caused by the Coriolis Effect?
