Elsewhere Edmund argues that the Antarctic ice cap is growing. Scientific American, however, reports it continues to shrink. The July 2008 issue, pg 18, has this: "The accelerating pace of climate warming in the earth's polar regions is spurring a new sense of scientific urgency. This past February 28th a camera on board the NASA satellite Aqua caught a Manhattan size floating piece of ice shelf in the act of disintegrating. Slabs continued to calve and break up throughout the next 10 days; by March 8 the Wilkins ice shelf, comprising some 5,000 square miles of floating ice off the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, had lost 160 square miles of ice to the Pacific Ocean.
The breakup is the latest of seven major Antarctic ice-shelf collapses in the past 30 years, after some 400 years of relative stability.... All of them corroborate temperature measurements showing that the western Antarctic Peninsula--now known as the Banana Belt--is warming up faster than any place else on earth.
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