sea ice

We haven’t heard a lot about the other ice sheet, the one at the South Pole. This is probably because no one lives on in the Antarctic, other than a few very cold scientists, and not that much is known about it, compared to the arctic, where data was amassed by Canadian, United States, and the Soviet military in their struggle for power during the cold war. What we do know is that the Arctic is in a very bad state: September Arctic sea ice has decreased between 1973 and 2007 at a rate of about -10% +/- 0.3% per decade. By contrast, ice in the Antarctic has shown very little trend over the same period, or even a slight increase since 1979.