For anyone who thinks (like I did) that Antarctica is a bone-chilling freezer lashed by constant blizzards, a visit to the Antarctic Peninsula is a surprise.

As you can see from the picture, you can even play soccer at the British Rothera research station -- Stuart Mc Dill of Reuters TV (a skilled left winger) and I (unskilled) joined in a game last night and I have the grazes to prove it. Our team managed to win, 4-2, on the gravel pitch outside the plane hangar -- meteorologist Ali Price brilliantly knocked in three, even though he was wearing a pair of clunking hiking boots.

And last weekend, staff had an outdoor barbecue with steaks and a cooler for drinks made from snow scooped up by a bulldozer.

At Rothera, summer temperatures now are comparable to the winter in England, where the British Antarctic Survey has its headquarters in Cambridge. On "warm" days, when temperatures climb to about 7 Celsius, some in Antarctica staff wander around outside in tee-shirts and even shorts.

Temperatures today are 0.5 Celsius (32.9 Fahrenheit), not much cooler than 4.4 Celsius (39.9 F) at BAS headquarters.

In recent days, it has rained at least as often as it has snowed at Rothera.

Of course there has been rain here long  before anyone ever thought about global warming. But BAS glaciologist David Vaughan (who took the picture above) says that temperatures on the peninsula have risen by up to 3 Celsius (5.4 F) in the past 50 years -- making rains more likely.

And all of Antarctica is getting warmer, according to a report in this week's edition of the journal Nature. Until now, scientists have reckoned that the warming is limited to the Antarctic Peninsula but the U.S. study (for a story, click here) says that warming extends far wider across the frozen continent.

Staff at research bases, who relax by playing soccer, are trying to work out the risks of warming -- a melt of ice sheets would add to sea level rise and have unknown impacts on wildlife from penguins to tiny mosses that have adapted to freezing temperatures.

Ice getting bigger hardly sounds like a sign of global warming but that’s apparently what is happening in the seas around Antarctica.

Leading climate scientists say that a tiny trend towards bigger ice in winter floating on the oceans around the frozen continent since the late 1970s — the maximum extent is around now, in September — is consistent with models of climate change that predict harsher winds and less warmer water at the surface.

It may even be that there’s more snow and rain falling onto the southern oceans because of climate change — that can raise the amount of fresh water on the surface and, hey presto, fresh water freezes at a higher temperature than salt water.

At Reuters News my colleagues and I often write stories about the shrinking of summer ice at the other end of the world, in the Arctic, as one of the clearest signs of global warming that is blamed by the U.N. Climate Panel on human use of fossil fuels.

In response to those stories, I often get e-mails from people sceptical about climate change who say that ice at the other end of the earth, around Antarctica, is expanding.

But it turns out that leading scientists at NASA, the British Antarctic Survey and Norway’s Nansen Center say the two things are not contradictory — the world reacts to greenhouse gases in different ways.

Antarctica is a gigantic frozen continent and winds sweep around it in the southern oceans, without drawing in much warmer air from further north. The Arctic is an open ocean ringed by continents, and more vulnerable to currents and winds blowing up from the south.

So you really can have your ice and melt it, depending on which pole you’re talking about.

What do you think?