Earlier, it was revealed that Antarctica is losing ice due to global warming, but a new NASA study is suggesting that the continent is actually gaining ice. The study used satellite data and found that Antarctica gained approximately 112 billion tons of ice every year from 1992 to 2001. From 2003 to 2008, the continent gained 82 billion tons of ice, the study revealed.

Jay Zwally, a glaciologist from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and lead author of the study, said the continent is actually gaining ice sheets in its east part and in the interior of West Antarctica. Regions like the Antarctic Peninsula and the Thwaites and Pine Island are continuously losing ice due to global warming, Zwally added.

The lead author said, "If the losses of the Antarctic Peninsula and parts of West Antarctica continue to increase at the same rate they've been increasing for the last two decades, the losses will catch up with the long-term gain in East Antarctica in 20 or 30 years".

The study published in the Journal of Glaciology on Friday used data collected by two European Space Agency European Remote Sensing satellites and NASA's Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite.

In a paper published in the Journal of Glaciology on Friday, researchers from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, the University of Maryland in College Park, and the engineering firm Sigma Space Corporation offer a new analysis of satellite data that show a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001 in the Antarctic ice sheet.

The paper calls attention to how difficult it is for scientists to measure small changes in ice height, particularly in East Antarctica, the largest part of the polar continent and the one that showed discrepancies with previous measurements. The scientists calculated this gain by looking at the height of the Antarctic ice sheet as measured by radar instruments on two European Space Agency satellites from 1992 to 2001, and by laser sensors on a NASA satellite from 2003 to 2008.

NASA explains that this has been possible because at the end of the last Ice Age about 10,000 years ago, warming air carried more moisture across the continent, doubling the amount of snowfall that has been accumulating and compacting it into solid ice.

Zwally's team calculated that the mass gain from the thickening of East Antarctica remained steady from 1992 to 2008 at 200 billion tons per year, while the ice losses from the coastal regions of West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula increased by 65 billion tons per year.

The extra snowfall that began 10,000 years ago has been slowly accumulating on the ice sheet and compacting into solid ice over millennia.
It is thickening the ice in east Antarctica and the interior of west Antarctica by an average of 0.7 inches per year.
This small thickening, sustained over thousands of years and spread over the vast expanse of these sectors of Antarctica, corresponds to a very large gain of ice.

Zwally said Antarctica is not currently a culprit of sea level rise, but it is going to contribute soon. The continent's growing ice sheet is preventing about 0.23 millimeters of sea level rise every year, as per the study. It means that there is some other contribution to rise in sea level which is not accounted for, Zwally added.