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Comment by homeslice23 | Hacker News Reader

So, if I'm reading the nifty infographic correctly, essentially all of the mass loss occurred between 1997-2000, and the total tonnage has remained consistent or even grown somewhat since 2000 (solid gray line in embedded timeseries chart in the first main figure). The article really tries to focus on the loss aspect, and the amount of ice lost between 1997 and 2000 is certainly shocking - nearly 10,000 gigatons in just a few years! But there hasn't really been any loss overall since about 2000. A complex picture, but maybe encouraging that things haven't deteriorated much over the last 20 or so years?

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I'm reading that chart as depicting the amount of mass lost per year, not the total remaining mass. So that means it's consistently losing mass every year

It’s really not clear whether the mass balance graph (in the video) shows overall mass balance, or mass balance over time. I think it’s the latter, which would mean the _decline_ has been stable since 2000 (except for two fields which grew). From the study:

> Surface mass balance

> We estimate the SMB of each ice shelf at monthly time resolution using output from three regional climate models

You're only looking at net numbers and not how it's an interconnected system and when one sheet goes so does it's support for those near it. Look at how significant the loss is on the west side. Read the article before speculating from your interpretation of a graphic please.

You're misreading it, it's YoY change. The shocking 10,000 gigatons is the new yearly baseline.

Maybe we are looking at different charts, but the one I see says 1997-2021 and the individual glacier lines almost all trend downwards over the whole period.

I wonder what the mass balance picture looks like when you add in the glaciers on land behind the ice sheets. It seems plausible that the ice shelves that seem be be stable or growing in size may be doing so simply because glaciers are moving out to sea faster than the edge of the ice shelves are calving, but I don't know if that effect is larger or smaller than the accumulation of new ice on the shelves.

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