Antarctic sea ice coverage has likely rebounded this year, coming closer to its annual summer average after four years of extreme lows, US scientists said Monday.<\/p>\n
The area covered by Antarctic sea ice likely reached its annual minimum level at 2.58 million square kilometres (996,000 square miles) on February 26, according to scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center\u00a0(NSIDC) at the\u00a0University of Colorado Boulder.<\/p>\n
Every year Antarctic sea ice reaches a minimum level during the southern hemisphere\u2019s summer, so this is the point that scientists measure it for annual readings.<\/p>\n
This year\u2019s level ranks as the 16th smallest since satellite measurements began in 1979.<\/p>\n
The 2026 minimum sea ice extent is closer to average than in the past four years, and 730,000 square kilometres above the record low set in February 2023, the scientists said.<\/p>\n
But it was still 260,000 square kilometres below the 1981-2010 average.<\/p>\n
\u201cThrough most of the year, Antarctic sea ice was well below the daily average,\u201d\u00a0said\u00a0Ted Scambos, senior research scientist at the\u00a0Cooperative Institute for Research in the Environmental Sciences\u00a0(CIRES).<\/p>\n
\u201cThen in January and February,\u00a0strong winds\u00a0from the south\u00a0pushed sea ice\u00a0outward\u00a0in the Weddell Sea. This slowed the overall decline\u00a0in extent,\u00a0leading\u00a0to a near-average minimum,\u201d Scambos said.<\/p>\n
The NSIDC cautioned that the 2026 figure is preliminary, noting that \u201ccontinued\u00a0melt conditions or strong onshore winds could still push the\u00a0ice\u00a0extent lower\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis year\u2019s return to less extreme conditions is not unexpected given the large year-to-year variation of Antarctic sea ice seen in the satellite record,\u201d said Walt Meier, scientist at the NASA NSIDC Distributed Active Archive Center.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Antarctic sea ice coverage has likely rebounded this year, coming closer to its annual summer average after four…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":530340,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[17765,64,63,6045,75,3389,210250,105],"class_list":["post-530339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-antarctic","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-climate","tag-environment","tag-international","tag-mna","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/530339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=530339"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/530339\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/530340"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=530339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=530339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=530339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}