Sept. 24, 2007 — Antarctica's once fringe-thawing is moving well inland, say scientists who have studied water-sensitive microwave satellite data spanning the years 1987 to 2006.
The worst melting happened in the summer of 2004-2005, with snow and ice melting in unlikely places, the researchers report.
"2005 was an extreme event," said Marco Tedesco of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Records of surface temperatures confirm that it was an unusually warm year at the bottom of the world, as well as one of the warmest years on record for Earth.
Water melt was spotted as far as 500 miles inland and at elevations of more than 5,500 feet in the Transantarctic Mountains, Tedesco told Discovery News.
The secret to detecting melting ice from space is looking for the marked increase in natural microwave emissions from water, Tedesco explained. Day or night, water naturally cools by emitting infrared and microwave energy.
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"When the liquid water appears it jumps up," said Tedesco of the microwave emissions. One day it's not there, the next day it is, he said.
The Special Sensor Microwave Imager onboard satellites from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program provided the data. The report on the melting is being published in the Sept. 22 issue of Geophysical Research Letters.
