Scientists have recently reported that the sea ice in Antarctica is melting at a surprising rate. As it was previously considered that Antarctic sea ice will expand, but it did not expand as much as though, according to a new study. A processing error in satellite data could be responsible for this misjudgment.

According to the study published in the journal, the measured expansion may be because of an error that researchers have not been able to observe so far.

According to the AR4 report, from 1979 to 2005, there is no change in the Antarctica sea ice cover; it remained constant and between 1979 and 2012, the rate of the sea ice in the southern hemisphere has increased about 16.5 thousand square kilometers per year, according to recent literature and AR5 report.

"This implies that the Antarctic sea ice trends reported in the IPCC's AR4 and AR5 [the 2007 and 2013 assessment reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] can't both be correct, our findings show that the data used in one of the reports contains a significant error. But we have not yet been able to identify which one contains the error", lead author Ian Eisenman, of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at University of California, San Diego, said in a statement

It was assumed by the scientist that more years have been added to the observational record due to which there is a difference between the two reports.

To measure sea ice cover, scientists used satellite data from the past 35 years but still the data was not perfect and observations are done from numerous different instruments, which operate on different satellites.

The technique was executed for both the reports AR4 and AR5 by the researchers but from the new study, it was found that in one of the reports there was calibration error in the data for December 1991. So, this has changed the overall trend.