Antarctic snowfall has increased over the past 200 years up to 10 percent, dumping enough snow on the region to fill the Dead Sea – twice, according to a study from the British Antarctic Survey released Monday.
The study said that the snowfall increase equates to 272 giga tons of water. The estimate came from an analysis of 79 ice cores collected around the icy continent. Liz Thomas, the lead author of the study, said the study was done to examine the role Antarctica plays in relation to sea levels, according to a statement released by the British Antarctic Survey.
"There is an urgent need to understand the contribution of Antarctic ice to sea-level rise and we use a number of techniques to determine the balance between snowfall and ice loss," Thomas said in the statement.
"When ice loss is not replenished by snowfall then sea level rises. Satellite observations give us a picture going back around 20 years. Analysis of the ice core records allows us to reconstruct snowfall over several hundred years," she continued.
The work of Thomas and an international team of researchers about the Antarctic snowfall was made public Monday at the European Geosciences Union meeting in Vienna, the British Antarctic Survey said.
The BBC News reported that by analyzing the chemistry of ice cores and such elements as hydrogen peroxide, it is possible to determine not only when their snows fell but also how much precipitation came down.
Hydrogen peroxide is a photochemical product that forms in the atmosphere when water vapor encounters sunlight, the BBC News wrote.
"For us, that's perfect," Thomas said, per BBC News. "Antarctica works like an on-off switch with the long 'polar nights' in winter and long periods of daylight in summer."
The examination revealed that Antarctica's greater precipitation delivered additional mass to the Antarctic ice sheet at a rate of 7 billion tons per decade from 1800 and 2010 and by 14 billion tons per decade from 1900 on.
"Our new results show a significant change in the surface mass balance (from snowfall) during the 20th century," Thomas said in the British Antarctic Survey statement. "The largest contribution is from the Antarctic Peninsula, where the annual average snowfall during the first decade of the 21st century is 10 percent higher than at the same period in the 19th century."
The survey claimed, though, that the snowfall increase does not contradict observations of glacial retreat and mass loss in regions of West Antarctica such as Pine Island and Thwaites Glacier, which are collectively contributing around 14 percent of global sea-level rise.
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