Antarctica has grown a new layer of ice for 40 million years. That's how it grew to its current size. The ice cores prove it.
This is correct, as far as it goes. Antarctica did build its ice sheet through annual accumulation over roughly 34 million years, and ice cores do document those layers. That geological history is not in dispute.
But here's the logical error: the mechanism that built the ice sheet over millions of years in a cooler climate tells you nothing about what the net mass balance is doing
right now, under current ocean and atmospheric temperatures. Past accumulation is not a guarantee of present accumulation. A savings account that grew for 40 years doesn't prove the balance is still growing today -- you have to look at the current statement.
For current Antarctic mass balance, you don't use ice cores. You use satellite gravimetry -- direct measurement of changes in Earth's gravitational pull caused by shifting mass. And that data is unambiguous:
NASA's GRACE and GRACE-FO satellites show that between 2002 and 2025, Antarctica shed approximately 135 gigatons of ice per year, contributing 0.4 millimeters per year to global sea level rise. East Antarctica did see modest mass gain from increased snowfall -- but that gain is more than offset by significant ice mass loss from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.
Prior to 2012, Antarctica was already losing 76 billion tons of ice annually. Between 2012 and 2017, that rate tripled to 219 billion tons per year.
The ice cores prove how Antarctica got big. GRACE proves it is now shrinking. Both are data. They just answer different questions
While there is the possibility of a giant iceberg calving event that would actually reduce AA's total ice for a 12 month span, we have never observed that,
This is simply and demonstrably false. The observations are extensive, satellite-documented, and published in peer-reviewed journals.
In 2023, Antarctica's Hektoria Glacier underwent what scientists describe as the most rapid retreat ever recorded in modern times. In just two months, nearly half of the glacier broke apart and disappeared -- losing about 8 kilometers of ice in 60 days. The event was reconstructed in detail using frequent satellite observations and seismic instruments that detected glacier earthquakes during the rapid retreat.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/02/260226042454.htm
Thwaites Glacier -- Earth's widest glacier -- is already losing ice more than five times faster than it was in the 1990s, and has been thinning and accelerating for decades, losing more ice to the ocean than it gains from snowfall.
https://phys.org/news/2026-03-thwaites-glacier-rival-entire-antarctic.html
As of 2026, marine geophysicist Robert Larter of the British Antarctic Survey -- who runs the U.K. arm of the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration -- states that Thwaites' eastern ice shelf is "poised to disintegrate" and will very likely break up in 2026.
https://www.sciencefocus.com/planet-earth/doomsday-glacier-melting-thwaites-antarctica
West Antarctica has been losing an average of 82 billion tonnes of ice each year for the last three decades, according to satellite observations
and hence any statement other than this is a 100% pure lie
The irony here is that the claim inverts reality. The actual "100% pure lie" would be asserting that no net ice loss has been observed when NASA, ESA, NOAA, and multiple independent research institutions have been measuring it continuously since 2002 using three independent methods: satellite gravimetry (GRACE/GRACE-FO), satellite radar altimetry (CryoSat-2, Sentinel-6), and in-situ measurements.
GRACE/GRACE-FO data spanning 2002–2024 show a continental mass balance that is definitively negative, driven overwhelmingly by dramatic ice-mass loss in West Antarctica -- particularly in the Amundsen Sea Embayment.
https://isprs-archives.copernicus.o...4/isprs-archives-XLVIII-2-W6-2024-51-2024.pdf
Even in East Antarctica, where snowfall has produced some mass gain, NASA scientists note that gain is "more than offset by the enormous increase in mass loss seen in the last two decades on other parts of the continent."
GRACE, GRACE-FO Satellite Data Track Ice Loss at the Poles – GRACE-FO
The "Antarctica is gaining ice" argument relies on confusing sea ice extent (floating ocean ice, which doesn't affect sea level and fluctuates seasonally) with land ice mass (glaciers and ice sheets, which do affect sea level). Those are two different things. The land ice mass balance is unambiguously negative and has been for at least two decades -- not because of "a calving event we've never observed," but because of continuous, measured, accelerating ice loss from outlet glaciers into warming ocean water.
Antarctica has grown ice and increased its amount of ice every year for millions of years.
Exactly right -- and that's precisely what makes what's happening
now so significant. For millions of years, the climate system was stable enough that Antarctica accumulated ice every single year without exception. That was the baseline. That was normal.
The fact that we have now broken that multi-million-year streak -- measurably, continuously, for over two decades -- is not a minor footnote. It's the whole argument for AGW in a single data point. What force is powerful enough to reverse a 34-million-year trend? It isn't natural variability, which operated within that trend for millions of years without reversing it. It's a rapid, novel forcing -- specifically the human-caused greenhouse effect -- that has warmed the deep ocean water undercutting West Antarctic glaciers faster than the system can compensate.
You just made the case for anthropogenic global warming while trying to argue against it.
