Last month I wrote an article entitled ‘Antarctica and Arctic
Polar Opposites‘ that looked at a study which showed that “the
total extent of sea ice surrounding Antarctica in the Southern
Ocean grew by roughly 6,600 square miles every year, with recent
research adding that that growth rate has accelerated recently,
up from an average rate of almost 4,300 square miles per year
from 1978 to 2006.” This month, a new study published in the
journal Nature Geoscience by scientists from NERC’s British
Antarctic Survey (BAS) and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
(JPL), Pasadena California shows that the contrary changes to
Antarctic sea ice drift that have occurred over the past two
decades is due to changing winds. The scientists explain that
the Antarctic sea ice cover has increased under the effects of
climate change, rather than decreasing such as has been seen on
the opposite side of the planet in the Arctic. Working from maps
created by JPL using over 5 million individual daily ice motion
measurements captured o