For USA Today’s Fact Check team, Kate S. Petersen debunks a viral Facebook post that misrepresented new research on Antarctic ice shelves. The study looked at a subset of ice shelves and found they are growing, but the post conflates the ice shelves with the overall Antarctic ice sheet to claim that ice overall is growing at the southern pole. In fact, the Antarctic ice sheet is shrinking, despite the increase in mass of the relatively small number studied in the paper. Image: MODIS Land Rapid Response Team, NASA GSFC, Aqua Mission
