The Antarctic sea might not be expanding as quickly as previously believed, according to new research, which also claims there could be a processing error in the satellite data.
Satellite observations suggest that sea ice cover in the Antarctic is expanding and that sea ice extent has reached record highs recently.
A team of researchers have released a study suggesting that a lot of the measured expansion of the Southern Hemisphere sea ice cover could be due to an error, which wasn't previously documented, in the way satellite data was processed, according to Live Science.
"This implies that the Antarctic sea ice trends reported in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2007 and 2013 reports cannot both be correct: our findings show that the data used in one of the reports contains a significant error," said lead author Ian Eisenman of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at University of California San Diego, according to Live Science.
Eisenman said that they have not been able to identify which one contains the error however.
A 2007 IPCC report says that Antarctic sea ice cover remained, more or less, constant from 1979 through 2005. A report released by IPCC in 2013 on the other hand indicated that between 1979 and 2012, Southern Hemisphere sea ice extent increased at a rate of about 16.5 thousand square km per year, according to the study.
"When we looked at how the numbers reported for the trend had changed, and we looked at the time series of Antarctic sea ice extent, it did not look right," Eisenman said.
Scientists have used satellite data to measure sea ice cover for 35 years.
If the error is in the current dataset, the results could have contributed to an unexpected resolution for the Antarctic sea ice cover enigma, according to research published in the The Cryosphere, a journal of the European Geosciences Union (EGU).
"Whatever the root of this ends up being, I highly doubt it was anything egregious," Eisenman said. "We're working with nuanced datasets here, trying to make long-term measurements with multiple instruments, none of which are directly measuring what we want."
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