2/24/2018 Could More Snow in Antarctica Slow Sea Level Rise?

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Could More Snow in Antarctica Slow Sea Level Rise?
New claims that increased snowfall in eastern regions could offset melting in the western side of
the continent might not stand the test of time

By Shannon Hall on February 23, 2018

Credit: Jeff Miller Getty Images

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2/24/2018 Could More Snow in Antarctica Slow Sea Level Rise? - Scientific American

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Some experts are heralding the news as a silver lining: Scientists have found snowfall
recently escalated in East Antarctica, which could lessen the high amounts of melt
seen in West Antarctica that are contributing to rising seas. That prospect is
comforting because the vast frozen desert at the underbelly of our world contains
about 200 feet of potential sea level rise. But other scientists argue the story line is
not so simple.

Scientists have long maintained rising temperatures would cause an increase in the
amount of vapor the air can hold. And they have suspected this could lead to more
snowfall in Antarctica, but observations were few and far apart. So Brooke Medley, a
NASA research scientist, and her colleagues, analyzed a 500-foot-deep ice core
extracted from the thick ice sheet in Queen Maud Land, an area in East Antarctica
due south of Africa’s southern tip.

Such a lengthy ice core contains a snowfall record dating back 2,000 years, allowing
the team to discover the flaky downfall is 25 percent higher today than it was in the
preindustrial era. What is more, when the team compared the observations with
global climate models, they found the snowfall accumulation was outpacing the
model predictions—a result that could mean the sea levels would not rise as much as
previously thought. “It’s not all doom and gloom,” Medley says. The team published
results earlier this month in Geophysical Research Letters.

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2/24/2018 Could More Snow in Antarctica Slow Sea Level Rise? - Scientific American

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But why would more snow mean less ocean rise? The answer has to do with
Antarctica’s delicate mass balance—the difference between the amount of ice gained
through snowfall and that lost via melting. In a world with a constant climate, that
difference would be zero; parts of the enormous ice sheet would gain mass whereas
other parts would lose it. “There is this kind of balancing act, or a tug of war between
the two processes,” Medley says. Even if more vigorous melting removes a greater and
greater amount of ice, that added water can evaporate into the cold air surrounding
the continent and fall back onto the ice sheet as snow. The continent might shape-
shift a little, perhaps with a lower ice sheet in the melting west and a higher one in the
snowy east, but the mass would stay the same, not raising seas.

An imbalance, however—which occurs when one of those processes gains the upper
hand—would either cause the ice sheet to grow, lowering the height of the oceans, or
shrink, raising the height. This appears to be the case for Antarctica today. The
prevailing view has been the subtracted melt—caused by glaciers that surge toward
the sea, icebergs that shatter into the ocean and meltwater that pools across the
surface—far outweighs the added snowfall. There is no doubt the continent would
shrink and the oceans rise. The big question is how much that rise might be.

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2/24/2018 Could More Snow in Antarctica Slow Sea Level Rise? - Scientific American

Unfortunately, the answer is not as simple as adding and subtracting ice in a basic
algebra equation. “On the one hand, if we just look at the snowfall, it will mitigate the
mass loss,” says Indrani Das, a geophysicist at Columbia University’s Lamont–
Doherty Earth Observatory. “But increased snowfall comes at a cost.”

That cost is a variety of side effects that would continue to force sea levels to rise
instead of drop. Over time ice sheets flow downhill from land to sea, seemingly in
slow motion, and extend out onto the water as ice shelves. Adding more snowfall can
send more ice into the ocean, according to Anders Levermann, a climate scientist at
the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany who was not involved
in the new study. That is because the snow falls partially on land, where it increases
the surface elevation, and partially onto the floating ice shelf, where it actually pushes
the shelf down into the water. The result is a steeper slope, which causes a faster flow.
And the effect is not small—in 2012 Levermann co-published a study that
demonstrated 30 to 65 percent of the ice from additional snowfall would slide back
into the ocean.

Winds are another factor. Alexis Berne, a radar meteorologist at the Swiss Federal
Institute of Technology, and his colleagues published a study last year that argued
snowflakes vanish—yes, vanish—before they hit the ground. The cause is cold, dry air
currents, known as katabatic winds, that flow from the high ice plateau down toward
the coast. When snow falls near the coast it hits that air and turns into water vapor.
“It’s just like a magician,” says Marco Tedesco, a geophysicist at Lamont–Doherty.
“You have snow there and then—boom—it’s in the atmosphere.”

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2/24/2018 Could More Snow in Antarctica Slow Sea Level Rise? - Scientific American

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Berne’s study estimated katabatic winds could lead to a 35 percent reduction in

snowfall around the margins of East Antarctica. And although his team has not yet
crunched the numbers, he suspects a warming world would only make this effect
more extreme. Even though Medley’s study found an increase in snowfall, Berne
suspects this effect might not last. Tedesco even argues those winds might have
pushed the snow toward Medley’s testing site.

It is easy to see why scientists like Jonathan Bamber, a glaciologist at the University
of Bristol in England, are nervous about extrapolating Medley’s results into the
future. “It’s an interesting story, but I think how you tell it really does depend on
where you are on that temperature curve,” he says. Evidence comes from Greenland,
which is warming much faster than Antarctica. There, an uptick in temperature is
causing snow crystals to merge together into larger grains than before. According to a
2016 study by Tedesco and colleagues, that reduces their reflectivity, allowing them to
absorb more sunlight than before and therefore melt faster. In other words: An
increase in snowfall might—once again—lead to an increase in melt.

Luckily, Antarctica is nowhere near as warm as Greenland, and its frigidity is

protected by intense polar winds. But should those temperatures rise drastically, both

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2/24/2018 Could More Snow in Antarctica Slow Sea Level Rise? - Scientific American

Tedesco and Bamber argue the same processes seen in Greenland today would likely
occur in Antarctica.

At the end of the day, many scientists argue it is not clear whether snowfall would
truly mitigate sea level rise or not. Scientists, however, agree on the overall story.
Theodore Scambos, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data
Center, points out that in a warmer climate, Antarctica would shrink. And Tedesco
says the graveness of the situation is clear. “Antarctica is a sleeping giant, and it’s
waking up very quickly.”

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Shannon Hall
Shannon Hall is a freelance science journalist based in New Hampshire.

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