{"id":121082,"date":"2025-08-30T15:45:08","date_gmt":"2025-08-30T15:45:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/121082\/"},"modified":"2025-08-30T15:45:08","modified_gmt":"2025-08-30T15:45:08","slug":"antarctica-is-changing-rapidly-the-consequences-could-be-dire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/121082\/","title":{"rendered":"Antarctica Is Changing Rapidly. The Consequences Could Be Dire"},"content":{"rendered":"

This story originally appeared on Grist<\/a> and is part of the Climate Desk<\/a> collaboration.<\/p>\n

Seen from space, Antarctica looks so much simpler than the other continents\u2014a great sheet of ice set in contrast to the dark waters of the encircling Southern Ocean. Get closer, though, and you\u2019ll find not a simple cap of frozen water, but an extraordinarily complex interplay between the ocean, sea ice, and ice sheets and shelves.<\/p>\n

That relationship is in serious peril. A new paper<\/a> in the journal Nature catalogs how several \u201cabrupt changes,\u201d like the precipitous loss of sea ice over the last decade, are unfolding in Antarctica and its surrounding waters, reinforcing one another and threatening to send the continent past the point of no return\u2014and flood coastal cities everywhere as the sea rises several feet.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re seeing a whole range of abrupt and surprising changes developing across Antarctica, but these aren\u2019t happening in isolation,\u201d said climate scientist Nerilie Abram, lead author of the paper. (She conducted the research while at Australian National University but is now chief scientist at the Australian Antarctic Division.) \u201cWhen we change one part of the system, that has knock-on effects that worsen the changes in other parts of the system. And we\u2019re talking about changes that also have global consequences.\u201d<\/p>\n

Scientists define abrupt change as a bit of the environment changing much faster than expected. In Antarctica these can occur on a range of times scales, from days or weeks for an ice shelf collapse, and centuries and beyond for the ice sheets. Unfortunately, these abrupt changes can self-perpetuate and become unstoppable as humans continue to warm the planet. \u201cIt\u2019s the choices that we\u2019re making right now, and this decade and the next, for greenhouse gas emissions that will set in place those commitments to long-term change,\u201d Abram said.<\/p>\n

A major driver of Antarctica\u2019s cascading crises is the loss of floating sea ice, which forms during winter. In 2014, it hit a peak extent (at least since satellite observations began in 1978) around Antarctica of 20.11 million square kilometers, or 7.76 million square miles. But since then, the coverage of sea ice has fallen not just precipitously, but almost unbelievably, contracting by 75 miles closer to the coast. During winters, when sea ice reaches its maximum coverage, it has declined 4.4 times faster around Antarctica than it has in the Arctic in the last decade.<\/p>\n

Put another way: The loss of winter sea ice in Antarctica over just the past decade is similar to what the Arctic has lost over the last 46 years. \u201cPeople always thought the Antarctic was not changing compared to the Arctic, and I think now we\u2019re seeing signs that that\u2019s no longer the case,\u201d said climatologist Ryan Fogt, who studies Antarctica at Ohio University but wasn\u2019t involved in the new paper. \u201cWe\u2019re seeing just as rapid\u2014and in many cases, more rapid\u2014change in the Antarctic than the Arctic lately.\u201d<\/p>\n

While scientists need to collect more data to determine if this is the beginning of a fundamental shift in Antarctica, the signals so far are ominous. \u201cWe\u2019re starting to see the pieces of the picture begin to emerge that we very well might be in this new state of dramatic loss of Antarctic sea ice,\u201d said Zachary M. Labe, a climate scientist who studies the region at the research group Climate Central, which wasn\u2019t involved in the new paper.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Seen from space, Antarctica…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":121083,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[9348,4253,5037,192,9458,79],"class_list":{"0":"post-121082","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-antarctica","9":"tag-climate-change","10":"tag-climate-desk","11":"tag-environment","12":"tag-oceans","13":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121082","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=121082"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121082\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/121083"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=121082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=121082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=121082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}