{"id":10396,"date":"2025-11-20T12:04:35","date_gmt":"2025-11-20T12:04:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mikeyoungacademy.dk\/?p=10396"},"modified":"2026-02-28T07:28:57","modified_gmt":"2026-02-28T07:28:57","slug":"ice-sheet-or-ice-shelf-whats-the-difference","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mikeyoungacademy.dk\/da\/ice-sheet-or-ice-shelf-whats-the-difference\/","title":{"rendered":"Ice sheet or ice shelf: What\u2019s the difference?"},"content":{"rendered":"

How a glaciology paper got pulled into the climate wars \u2014 and what you can learn from research that went viral for all the wrong reasons<\/span><\/h4>\n

I talked to Julia Andreasen while doing research for our book \u2018Social Media for Research Impact\u2019<\/a> which I wrote with Marcel Bogers (to be released by Routledge in January 2o26).<\/p>\n

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Julia Andreasen is a postdoc at the University of Alaska Fairbanks<\/p><\/div>\n

Julia, who is now a postdoc at the International Arctic Research Center<\/a>, University of Alaska Fairbanks, co-authored a paper in The Cryosphere<\/em><\/a> in 2023\u00a0showing that more Antarctic ice shelves had grown than retreated between 2009 and 2019. It was a small, careful study, meant to fill a narrow data gap, and based on work she and her co-authors (Anna Hogg and Heather Selley) did during her master\u2019s. But it got swept up in the larger climate debate after a single sentence from the abstract was lifted out of context and reframed by climate skeptics as evidence against global warming.<\/p>\n

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On Twitter (now X) everything bled into everything else.<\/p><\/div>\n

In the abstract of the paper, she and her coauthors had written that\u00a0more ice shelves were advancing than retreating\u00a0<\/em>in the period they studied. It was a descriptive observation, not a climate claim. But the sentence was seized upon by climate change skeptics.<\/p>\n

Just to be clear: Ice\u00a0shelves<\/em>\u00a0float on the ocean and respond quickly to winds, snowfall, and iceberg calving. Ice\u00a0sheets<\/em>, by contrast, are grounded ice that can melt due to climate change and raise sea levels. On Twitter (now X), the distinction between the two terms got blurred. \u2018Shelf\u2019 became \u2018sheet\u2019. A carefully worded scientific paper became a talking point in a viral pile-on.<\/p>\n

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If there were actual questions to our study, then I did reply, but I would never hear anything back<\/p>\n

Julia Andreasen<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cWe are trying to understand climate change, but not everything that we discover is necessarily going to directly equate to climate change as we are looking at a short snapshot. In one way, this is what makes the field so interesting in the first place,\u201d says Julia Andreasen.<\/p>\n

She recalls the moment the online storm hit her personally: “I was in the car on the way home from a memorial service… and I just started getting pings and pings and pings.”<\/p>\n

Tweets and notifications then spilled over into emails asking for answers. Julia tried to stay away from X, \u201cbut on email… if there were actual questions to our study, then I did reply, but I would never hear anything back,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

On social media, \u201ca master’s student I don’t know personally went to bat for me, like he was defending our team and replying to so many of the tweets and getting into the arguments online. I remember messaging him and telling him that what he was doing was so kind,\u201d Julia recalls.<\/p>\n

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Julia Andreasen has written up her recommendations so that scientists in politicised fields can prepare.<\/p><\/div>\n

Their small-scale study of a narrow data gap was, for a short moment, the focus of controversy on climate change.<\/p>\n

In our book we refer to the term \u2018context collapse\u2019 when a social media post that was originally intended for a specific audience is exposed to other unintended audiences. It leads to misinterpretations when the context \u2014 or background knowledge \u2014 doesn\u2019t travel with the shared post or image.<\/p>\n

Knowing that this happens, trolls or campaigners who have particular political agendas, may use this phenomenon to deliberately share texts or images in their context to forward a particular agenda. They typically monitor social media posts or new papers for combinations of keywords \u2014 and then have a social media routine where they respond to, and share posts with these keywords in their context for the purpose of \u2018owning\u2019 a debate on a social media platform.<\/p>\n

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I truly thought that I was the only person to ever experience this. I felt like they were using me as a way to say that climate change isn’t real<\/p>\n

Julia Andreasen<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Context collapse can happen in any field, but deliberate manipulation happens typically in politicized fields (like glaciology in a climate change context). Julia\u2019s study may have been the victim of this.<\/p>\n

So what happened?<\/em><\/p>\n

At the height of all the tweets and replies, Julia was doing her preliminary exams for her PhD.\u00a0\u00a0Luckily, her supervisor explained to the committee what was going on, and this in itself became the subject of discussion.<\/p>\n

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Ice sheets are grounded ice, as illustrated here on Antarctica (NASA Goddard’s Scientific Visualization Studio, Public Domain)<\/p><\/div>\n

Other, more seasoned, scientists also chipped in around this time with the advice that Julia should focus on her upcoming field work and not to let herself get sucked into \u201cthis sort of black hole that the internet has created,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

\u201cI truly thought that I was the only person to ever experience this. I felt like they were using me as a way to say that climate change isn’t real. And that felt pretty awful. I didn’t feel like I had any voice and so I felt very small compared to the loud voices in the space.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBut everyone in our community was supportive. And I think that was that really was revealed to me when fact check articles came out, because there were other scientists in my community responding to that and providing additional information.\u201d<\/p>\n

After a while, of course, the whole outburst of controversy died down as these things do. It is impossible to gauge its effect, if any. No-one knows whether the storm on X ever really moved anyone towards climate skepticism or whether it just made the critical tweeters look naive. The only thing we know is that original article was recognized by science news site Carbon Brief<\/a>\u00a0as having the highest Altmetrics score ever among their climate paper reviews.\u00a0Altmetrics track how research is shared and discussed online.<\/p>\n

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This is an ice shelf, specifically, the Ross Ice Shelf in 1997 (NOAA Corps Collection – public domain)<\/p><\/div>\n

The paper\u2019s high score is likely a result of the controversy. If anything, it might have incited curiosity for the science behind glaciology among those who are genuinely interested.<\/p>\n

Julia Andreasen has written up her recommendations so that other scientists can prepare in an article in EOS which can be read here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Julia Andreasen\u2019s advice:<\/p>\n