Since the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report, new observations of ice-sheet mass balance and improved computer simulations of ice-sheet response to continuing climate change have been published. Whereas Greenland is losing ice mass at an increasing pace, current Antarctic ice loss is likely to be less than some recently published estimates. It remains unclear whether East Antarctica has been gaining or losing ice mass over the past 20 years, and uncertainties in ice-mass change for West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula remain large. We discuss the past six years of progress and examine the key problems that remain. Download the article.
The work presented here is based on the Ice-Sheet Mass Balance and Sea Level (ISMASS) workshop that was held in Portland, Oregon, USA, on 14 July 2012. This workshop was jointly organized by the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR), the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC) and the Word Climate Research Programme (WCRP), and was co-sponsored by the International Council for Science (ICSU), SCAR, IASC, WCRP, the International Glaciological Society (IGS) and the International Association of Cryospheric Sciences (IACS), with support fromClimate and Cryosphere (CliC) and the Association of Polar Early Career Scientists (APECS).
Results from that workshop, videos of presentations and more can be found here: http://www.climate-cryosphere.org/en/events/2012/ISMASS/Results.html. Download the article.