The Antarctic Bulletin Reports Ice Loss 'Within Model' — and Unsettling All the Same

GENEVA — The Polar Cryosphere Survey published its quarterly Antarctic bulletin on Sunday, and its lead glaciologist spent the afternoon doing the hardest job in her profession: telling a nervous planet two true things at once. The ice loss recorded this quarter was accelerated, the fastest reading in the monitored sectors in several years. It was also, by every metric the Survey tracks, within the range its models had projected. Both sentences are correct. Neither is comfortable. "Within model does not mean reassuring," Dr. Ada Adeyemi said, standing before a wall of sector maps at the Survey's briefing. "It means the system is behaving the way our uncertain math said it might — and our math has always carried a wide margin, because the ice is a thing we are still learning to read." She declined, repeatedly and deliberately, to translate the numbers into prophecy. There is no verdict in a quarterly bulletin, she said; there is a measurement, an error bar, and the patience to take the next one. The monitored shelf around the Thwaites Glacier, where the Kronos Energy Syndicate operates under a standing advisory, drew the closest scrutiny and the same careful language. The instruments are dense there, Adeyemi noted, and the readings precise. What they cannot yet do, she said, is tell anyone how the story ends. The next bulletin is due in three months, she said; the Survey will take the reading and publish it, the way it published this one.