NASA has just released what it calls the most comprehensive survey ever attempted of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, confirming scientists's grave concerns that “climate warming is changing how much water remains locked in Earth’s largest storehouses of ice and snow,” according to the agency’s recent press release. “If the trends we’re seeing continue and climate warming continues as predicted, the polar ice sheets could change dramatically,” says the release, which means that sea levels, in turn, will likely also change dramatically (upward).

While the results are gloomy at best, the good news is that the study reveals an increasing effort within the agency to freely discuss such findings: “A few months ago this press release might have been seriously edited or not approved,” the study’s lead author Jay Zwally said in a recent MSNBC article. The greater freedom is presumably a response to public complaints against the Bush administration’s pressure to silence the agency’s climate data – complaints voiced by the head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at NASA, Jim Hansen. Rolling Stone recently names Hansen the Paul Revere of Global Warming.

Photo credit: NASA.gov