Doomsday glacier could give way any day now

 From Just Have A Think

Yes, the danger isn't immediate.  But when the "plug" holding the Thwaites glacier goes, it will start a process which could raise the sea level by 3 metres over the next few decades.

Record winter temperatures in Antarctica

 

On King George Island the landscape has changed from mostly white to brown, grey and green. Photograph: Luis Muñoz

From The Guardian

Temperatures in the Antarctic climbed above 15C this month, shattering the previous winter heat record for the usually frozen region and raising concerns about the speed of climate breakdown.  [Reminder: since this is the Southern Hemisphere, it is mid-winter now, the equivalent of December in the N.H.]

The new winter peak temperature was logged by the Argentinian Esperanza base on the Trinity peninsula on 6 June amid a protracted heatwave, when the maximum daily temperature exceeded zero degrees for three consecutive weeks.

Scientists said the high of 15.4C broke the previous record set at the same station in 1998 by 2C. “This is absolutely crazy,” said Raúl Cordero, an Ecuadorian climate professor at the University of Groningen. “It is also about 20C above normal for this time of the year. That is a huge anomaly.”

Unusually strong warm winds from the north blew across much of the Antarctic peninsula. One Chilean weather station, Boonen Rivera, registered temperatures of close to 13C, Cordero said.

On King George Island, 100 miles (160km) from Esperanza, researchers said the landscape had changed from mostly white to brown, grey and green after temperatures hit 4.6C on 6 June.

“Last weekend was very strange. The temperatures here went very high so everything outside melted,” said Luis Muñoz, a Chilean glaciologist. “Usually there is 20cm of snow and a lot of ice on the ground at this time.”

Muñoz said he and a colleague, Natalia Mestre, climbed to the 500-metre peak of the nearby Collins glacier last Wednesday and were surprised to find rain melting the ice. “There was a direct impact on the glacier, which should be receiving snow now. It should not be suffering ablation at this time of the year. This is obviously not good for the glacier.”

The Antarctic region is coming under increasing human pressure, directly in the form of resource exploration and tourism and indirectly through the burning of fossil fuels, which is heating the planet.

Scientists warn that some of the region’s biggest glaciers, such as Thwaites and Pine Island, are approaching or may even have passed a tipping point that could push up global sea levels by four metres. Antarctic ice melt has also been found to slow global ocean circulation.

Cordero said a single winter of heatwaves, no matter how amazing, would not by itself make a huge difference to sea levels, but it signified more alarming long-term trends. “This heatwave happened because of extremely strong westerlies,” he said. “This has been happening with increasing frequency since the 1980s, and that is known to be related to climate change.”

 We are doing too little to slash emissions.  We need to do it as soon as possible, not in 10 or 20 years' time.   In almost every country around the world, the combination of wind, solar and batteries is as cheap as or cheaper than coal and much cheaper than gas.  EVs, outside the US and Europe, are as cheap as petrol/diesel cars, and obviously much cheaper to run as well.  It's a marriage made in heaven: clean electricity to drive your vehicle fleet, and a huge mobile battery resource which helps stabilise the grid.  Let's just do it, instead of phaffing around.

Italian glacier disappears

With hat tip to  John F 

[Translated from German]   Glaciers are a clear marker for climate change. Here is the glacier at Stilsfer Joch in 1909 and 2024.

The Stilfser Joch in 1909

The Stilfset Joch in 2024

Record low for Arctic sea ice

 From Prof Eliot Jacobson

 

Average Arctic sea-ice extent for the month of February, 2025, just set a new record low for the month with an average extent of 13,086,000 km². This month's record beat the previous record low set in February, 2018, by over 293,000 km².

Simultaneous global cascading catastrophes

 From Prof Eliot Jacobson

A quick reminder that we are witnessing the beginning of simultaneous cascading global catastrophes.

Polar ice keeps on plunging

 From Rick Thoman

Arctic-wide sea ice extent is the lowest in 47-year NSIDC satellite record for February 7, and it's the lowest by a lot: 430,000 km² of "lost ice" compared to the previous lowest (2017) and about 2.2 million km² less than was typical on February 7 in the early 1980s. #Arctic #SeaIce #ClimateChange

From Professor Eliot Jacobson

Breaking News! Code UFB!!! Global sea-ice extent is now at an all-time record low in recorded history, with global sea-ice extent now 2.14 million square kilometers below the 1991-2020 average. Images of the current Arctic and Antarctic sea-ice extent are in the following posts in this thread.

Yet companies, politicians and techbros continue to pretend they are doing something and they care.  They really, really do.

Global sea ice reaches new record low

 From Prof Eliot Jacobson

Arctic sea ice volume continues to slump

Hat tip to Nathan A Leaf

 

The Arctic. Temperature up, ice down

 From Zack Labe

Global sea ice plunging to record lows

 From a post by Peter Dynes

Global Sea Ice taking a nose dive to record lows. We are losing over 25,000 tonnes of Ice from the Arctic per second. That’s a lot of Ice. Earth's heating rate will accelerate the more sea ice we lose. The general public is totally unaware of this danger.

Sea ice near record lows for the current date

 From a toot by Zack Labe

Both poles are now observing unusually low sea ice conditions, and therefore global sea ice extent is yet again near record low levels for the current date...

More sea ice graphics available at ZackLabe.comhttps://ten

Air, ocean and ice climate records tumbled in 2023

From Weatherzone

The World Meteorological Organization has confirmed that 2023 was an astonishing year for our planet’s climate, with records obliterated in the atmosphere, hydrosphere and cryosphere.

 

Atmosphere

Global air temperatures frequently made headlines around the world in 2023 as records fell month after month.

Every calendar month from June to December set a new global average near-surface air temperature record for that time of year.

This string of exceptional warmth in the second half of 2023 pushed the annual global mean air temperature to 1.45°C (±?0.12?°C) above the 1850 to 1900 pre-industrial baseline. According to the WMO, this was the highest annual mean temperature on record, beating the previous record from 2016 by 0.16ºC.

Oceans

The record warmth in Earth’s atmosphere last year was also mirrored in the oceans, with global sea surface temperatures reaching record-breaking levels from March onwards.

Every month from April to December set a new respective monthly record in 2023, while a new daily sea surface temperature record was observed in August (note that this has since been exceeded in 2024).

 

Image: Daily global sea surface temperatures between 1979 and 2024 to date, based on the ERA5 dataset. Source: Copernicus Climate Change Service

The global mean sea level also reached a new record height in 2023, driven by abnormal ocean warmth and increased melting of glaciers and ice sheets.

According to the WMO, “the rate of global mean sea level rise in the past ten years (2014–2023) is more than twice the rate of sea level rise in the first decade of the satellite record (1993–2002).”

Ice

Parts of the cryosphere – the frozen portions of our planet – also broke records in 2023.

Antarctic sea-ice extent reached record lows for the seasonal minimum extent in February and maximum extent in September.

Glacier melt was also pushed to new levels in 2023. According to the WMO, “preliminary data from the global set of reference glaciers for the hydrological year 2022-2023 show they experienced the largest loss of ice on record.”

What made 2023 so warm?

Climate change and El Niño were both contributing factors to the record-breaking warmth in 2023. However, these drivers alone aren’t enough to account for the magnitude of last year’s abnormal warmth.

According to the Copernicus Climate Change Service, other influences that may have contributed to the exceptional state of the climate in 2023 are:

• Enhanced stratospheric water vapour due to the eruption in January 2022 of the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha'apai volcano
• Reduced aerosols due to lower sulphur dioxide emissions by shipping
• The approach of the current solar cycle to its peak.

These influences are still an active topic of research and may continue to influence Earth’s global climate system in 2024. Monitoring Earth’s global climate system is an essential part of understanding how the climate is changing and what steps need to be taken, now and in the future, to mitigate its effects.

2023 hottest year by a huge margin

 From The Guardian

2023 “smashed” the record for the hottest year by a huge margin, providing “dramatic testimony” of how much warmer and more dangerous today’s climate is from the cooler one in which human civilisation developed.

The planet was 1.48C hotter in 2023 compared with the period before the mass burning of fossil fuels ignited the climate crisis. The figure is very close to the 1.5C temperature target set by countries in Paris in 2015, although the global temperature would need to be consistently above 1.5C for the target to be considered broken.

Scientists at the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (CCCS) said it was likely the 1.5C mark will be passed for the first time in the next 12 months. The average temperature in 2023 was 0.17C higher than in 2016, the previous record year, marking a very large increase in climate terms. The primary cause of this increased global heating was continued record emissions of carbon dioxide, assisted by the return of the natural climate phenomenon El Niño.

The high temperatures drove heatwaves, floods and wildfires, damaging lives and livelihoods across the world. Analysis showed some extreme weather, such as heatwaves in Europe and the US, would have been virtually impossible without human-caused global heating.

The CCCS data also showed that 2023 was the first year on record when every day was at least 1C warmer than the 1850-1900 pre-industrial record. Almost half the days were 1.5C hotter and, for the first time, two days were more than 2C hotter. The higher temperatures increased from June, with September’s heat so far above previous averages that one scientist called it “gobsmackingly bananas”.

Samantha Burgess, the CCCS deputy director, said: “2023 was an exceptional year, with climate records tumbling like dominoes. Temperatures during 2023 likely exceed those of any period in at least the last 100,000 years.”

Prof Bill Collins, at the University of Reading, UK, said: “It is a shock that 2023 unarguably smashed the global temperature record. More global warming is expected to cause even wetter winters in the UK and yet more flooding.”

Hundreds of scientific studies have shown the climate crisis is causing more extreme and more frequent extreme weather. While 2023 was perceived by many as a year in which global heating accelerated, scientists said the higher temperatures were in line with the predicted result of increased carbon emissions. However, the speed and intensity of severe weather impacts alarmed many experts.

A separate analysis by Japan’s Meteorological Agency produced very similar results as Copernicus, with 2023 a record 1.43C above pre-industrial levels and beating the previous record by 0.14C.

Prof Andrew Dessler, at Texas A&M University in the US, said the record set in 2023 was not surprising: “Every year for the rest of your life will be one of the hottest [on] record. This in turn means that 2023 will end up being one of the coldest years of this century. Enjoy it while it lasts.”

Greenland melt punching off the charts

 From a tweet by Professor Jason Box

Greenland melt punching off the charts

Yet still we subsidise fossil fuels.  Still we do too little to slash emissions.  Still the Right are wall-to-wall denialists.  

Antarctic ice sheet melting 20 times faster than we thought

From a toot by Bread & Circuses

We do NOT want the Antarctic Ice Sheet to melt any faster than it already is. The risks of so much fresh water pouring into the ocean are massive — not only increased sea level rise, but also more greenhouse gas emissions going into the atmosphere, plus the potential for serious disruption to the global food chain. (See https://climatejustice.social/@breadandcircuses/110174993496613175)

And now we get this terrible news...
____________________________

"Antarctic ice can melt 20 times faster than we thought"

Melting ice sheets in Antarctica can retreat much faster than scientists previously thought. A study published in the journal Nature found that at the end of the last Ice Age, parts of the Eurasian Ice Sheet retreated up to 2,000 feet per day. This rate is 20 times faster than previous measurements. These changes far outpace even the fastest-moving glaciers studied in Antarctica, which are estimated to retreat as quickly as 160 feet per day.

“Our research provides a warning from the past about the speeds that ice sheets are physically capable of retreating at,” Christine Batchelor, study co-author and physical geographer from Newcastle University, said in a statement. “Our results show that pulses of rapid retreat can be far quicker than anything we’ve seen so far.”
____________________________

FULL STORY -- https://www.popsci.com/environment/antarcti

Before boosting this post from 10 April, I added the chart below showing current Antarctic sea ice extent anomalies, which are shocking in their departure from the norm. Although sea ice is different from ice sheets on land, they do interact — as sea ice declines and weakens, it allows for faster collapse of glaciers when they reach the ocean.

#Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateAction #ClimateEmergency #Ocean

Himalayan glaciers to shrink 75% by 2100

From Reuters

Glaciers in Asia’s Hindu Kush Himalaya could lose up to 75% of their volume by century’s end due to global warming, causing both dangerous flooding and water shortages for the 240 million people who live in the mountainous region, according to a new report.

A team of international scientists has found that ice loss in the region, home to the famous peaks of Everest and K2, is speeding up. During the 2010s, the glaciers shed ice as much as 65% faster than they had in the preceding decade, according to the assessment by the Kathmandu-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), an intergovernmental scientific authority on the region.

“We’re losing the glaciers, and we’re losing them in 100 years’ time,” said Philippus Wester, an environmental scientist and ICIMOD fellow who was the lead author of the report.

The Hindu Kush Himalaya stretches 3,500 km (2,175 miles) across Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal and Pakistan.

At 1.5 degrees Celsius or 2C of warming above preindustrial temperatures, glaciers across the entire region will lose 30% to 50% of their volume by 2100, the report said.

But where glaciers will melt most depends on location. At 3C of warming — what the world is roughly on track for under current climate policies — glaciers in the Eastern Himalaya, which includes Nepal and Bhutan, will lose up to 75% of their ice. At 4C of warming, that ticks up to 80%.

Scientists have struggled to assess how climate change is affecting the Hindu Kush Himalaya. Unlike the European Alps and North America’s Rocky Mountains, the region lacks a long historical record of field measurements that reveal whether glaciers are growing or shrinking.

“There was always some uncertainty in the Himalaya — are they really melting?”, said Wester.

In 2019, the United States declassified spy satellite images of the region’s glaciers dating back to 1970, providing a new scientific baseline.

Further advances in satellite technology in the past five years, alongside bolstered field efforts, have buoyed scientists’ understanding of the changes underway. The report draws on data running through December 2022.

“While the knowledge of the Himalayan glaciers is still not as good as the Alps, it’s now comparable to other regions like the Andes,” said Tobias Bolch, a glaciologist with Graz University of Technology in Austria unaffiliated with the report.

Compared with a 2019 ICIMOD assessment of the region, “there’s a much higher level of confidence now in these findings,” said Wester. “We have a better sense of what the loss will be through to 2100 at different levels of global warming.”

With this newfound understanding comes grave concern for the people living in the Hindu Kush Himalaya.

The report found water flows in the region’s 12 river basins, including the Ganges, Indus, and Mekong, are likely to peak around mid-century, with consequences for the more than 1.6 billion people who depend on this supply.

"While it may sound like we'll have more water because glaciers are melting at an increased rate ... too frequently it will arise as floods instead of a steady flow," said Wester. Past peak water, supplies will eventually dwindle.

Many high mountain communities use glacial water and snowmelt to irrigate crops. But the timing of when snow falls has become more erratic, and there’s less than there used to be.

“We’ve had … huge numbers of yak deaths because during summer they go to higher pastures,” said report co-author Amina Maharjan, a senior specialist in livelihoods and migration at ICIMOD. If the snow falls too soon, “the entire area is covered in snow and they don’t have grass to graze”.

People are now moving away from mountain communities to earn income elsewhere, she said.

Melting glaciers also pose a danger to downstream communities. Runoff pools in shallow lakes, held back by rocks and debris. The risk comes when a lake overfills, bursting through its natural barrier and sending a torrent of water rushing down mountain valleys.

Governments are trying to prepare for these changes. China is working to shore up the country’s water supplies. And Pakistan is installing early warning systems for glacial lake outburst floods.

View of the landscape at Langtang, Nepal. Tika Gurung/Handout via REUTERS

 

Record ocean temperatures

 From The Guardian

Temperatures in the world’s oceans have broken fresh records, testing new highs for more than a month in an “unprecedented” run that has led to scientists stating the Earth has reached “uncharted territory” in the climate crisis.

The rapid acceleration of ocean temperatures in the last month is an anomaly that scientists have yet to explain. Data collated by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), known as the Optimum Interpolation Sea Surface Temperature (OISST) series, gathered by satellites and buoys, has shown temperatures higher than in any previous year, in a series stretching back to 1981, continuously over the past 42 days.

The world is thought to be on the brink of an El Niño weather event this year – a cyclical weather system in the Pacific, that has a warming impact globally. But the El Niño system is yet to develop, so this oscillation cannot explain the recent rapid heating, at a time of year when ocean temperatures are normally declining from their annual March and April peaks.

Prof Mike Meredith of the British Antarctic Survey said: “This has got scientists scratching their heads. The fact that it is warming as much as it has been is a real surprise, and very concerning. It could be a short-lived extreme high, or it could be the start of something much more serious.”

Warming oceans are a concern for many reasons. Seawater takes up more space at higher temperatures, accelerating sea level rise, and warmer water at the poles accelerates the melting of the ice caps. Hotter temperatures can also be dire for marine ecosystems, as it can be difficult or impossible for species to adapt. Corals in particular can suffer devastating bleaching.

Some scientists fear that the rapid warming could be a sign of the climate crisis progressing at a faster rate than predicted. The oceans have acted as a kind of global buffer to the climate crisis over recent decades, both by absorbing vast amounts of the carbon dioxide that we have poured into the atmosphere, and by storing about 90% of the excess energy and heat this has created, dampening some of the impacts of global heating on land. Some scientists fear we could be reaching the limit of the oceans’ capacity to absorb these excesses.

Mark Maslin, professor of Earth system science at University College London, said the climate crisis was taking hold before our eyes. “Climate scientists were shocked by the extreme weather events in 2021,” he said. “Many hoped this was just an extreme year. But they continued into 2022 and now they are occurring in 2023. It seems we have moved to a warmer climate system with frequent extreme climate events and record-breaking temperatures that are the new normal. It is difficult to see how anyone can deny climate change is happening and having devastating effects around the world.”

Note that this is before the impact of El Niño, which is forecast to occur later this year.  

Accelerated melt of ice sheets now unmistakable

From The BBC

If you could shape an ice cube out of all the ice losses from Greenland and Antarctica over the past three decades, it would stand 20km high.

An international group of scientists who work with satellite data say the acceleration in the melting of Earth's ice sheets is now unmistakable.

They calculate the planet's frozen poles lost 7,560 billion tonnes in mass between 1992 and 2022.

Seven of the worst melting years have occurred in the past decade.

Mass loss from Greenland and Antarctica is now responsible for a quarter of all sea-level rise.

This contribution is five times what it was 30 years ago.

The latest assessment comes from the Ice Sheet Mass Balance Intercomparison Exercise, or Imbie.

This project, which is supported by the US and European space agencies, issues regular reviews of the state of the planet's ice sheets.

This is the third such report, and like the previous studies, it has collated and reviewed all available satellite measurements.

It includes the observations from orbit of some 50 spacecraft missions from 1992. That particular year was when orbiting instruments best suited to studying the elevation and velocity of ice started overflying the poles routinely.

The 7,560 billion tonnes of ice lost from Greenland and Antarctica during the study period pushed up sea-levels by 21mm.

Almost two-thirds (13.5mm) of this was due to melting in Greenland; one-third (7.4mm) was the result of melting in Antarctica.

"All this has profound implications for coastal communities around the world and their risk of being exposed to flooding and erosion," said Dr Inès Otosaka from the UK's Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling (CPOM), who led the latest assessment.

"It's really important that we have robust estimates for the future contribution to sea-level rise from the ice sheets so that we can go to these communities and say, 'Yes, we understand what is happening and we can now start to plan mitigations'," she told BBC News.

Warmer air is melting the top of the Greenland Ice Sheet (NASA/GODDARD/MARIA-JOSÉ VIÑAS)

Arctic 7 degrees warmer

 From a toot by Rick Thoman

50-year change in winter (December through February) average temperature around the #Arctic, updated to 1973-74 to 2022-23 from ERA5 courtesy of ECMWF/Copernicus. Incredible warming Svalbard area due to loss of winter #seaice. Only significant area north of 60ºN showing even modest cooling is in eastern Siberia and parts of Russian Far East.

Antarctic sea ice reaches record low

From The Guardian

For 44 years, satellites have helped scientists track how much ice is floating on the ocean around Antarctica’s 18,000km coastline.

The continent’s fringing waters witness a massive shift each year, with sea ice peaking at about 18m sq km each September before dropping to just above 2m sq km by February.

But across those four decades of satellite observations, there has never been less ice around the continent than there was last week.

“By the end of January we could tell it was only a matter of time. It wasn’t even a close run thing,” says Dr Will Hobbs, an Antarctic sea ice expert at the University of Tasmania with the Australian Antarctic Program Partnership.

“We are seeing less ice everywhere. It’s a circumpolar event.”

In the southern hemisphere summer of 2022, the amount of sea ice dropped to 1.92m sq km on 25 February – an all-time low based on satellite observations that started in 1979.

But by 12 February this year, the 2022 record had already been broken. The ice kept melting, reaching a new record low of 1.79m sq km on 25 February and beating the previous record by 136,000 sq km – an area double the size of Tasmania.

In the southern hemisphere’s spring, strong winds over western Antarctica buffeted the ice. At the same time, Hobbs says large areas in the west of the continent had barely recovered from the previous year’s losses.

“Because sea ice is so reflective, it’s hard to melt from sunlight. But if you get open water behind it, that can melt the ice from underneath,” says Hobbs.

Hobbs and other scientists said the new record – the third time it’s been broken in six years – has started a scramble for answers among polar scientists.

The fate of Antarctica – especially the ice on land – is important because the continent holds enough ice to raise sea levels by many metres if it was to melt.

While melting sea ice does not directly raise sea levels because it is already floating on water, several scientists told the Guardian of knock-on effects that can.

Sea ice helps to buffer the effect of storms on ice attached to the coast. If it starts to disappear for longer, the increased wave action can weaken those floating ice shelves that themselves stabilise the massive ice sheets and glaciers behind them on the land.

One major area of concern is a marked loss of ice around the Amundsen and Bellinghausen seas on the continent’s west.

Even as the average amount of sea ice around the continent grew up to 2014, these two neighbouring seas saw losses.

That’s important because the region is home to the vulnerable Thwaites glacier – known as the “doomsday glacier” because it holds enough water to raise sea levels by half a metre.

“We don’t want to lose sea ice where there are these vulnerable ice shelves and, behind them, the ice sheets,” Prof Matt England, an oceanographer and climate scientist at the University of New South Wales, says.

“We are probably starting to see signs of significant warming and retreat of sea ice [in Antarctica]. To see it getting to these levels is definitely a concern because we have these potentially amplifying feedbacks.”

Data provided by scientists Dr Rob Massom, of the Australian Antarctic Division, and Dr Phil Reid, of the Bureau of Meteorology, shows two-thirds of the continent’s coastline was exposed to open water last month – well above the long-term average of about 50%.

“It’s not just the extent of the ice, but also the duration of the coverage,” Massom says. “If the sea ice is removed, you expose floating ice margins to waves that can flex them and increase the probability of those ice shelves calving. That then allows more grounded ice into the ocean.”

Massom and Reid published a study last year that found that, since 1979, the Amundsen Sea region was seeing longer periods without ice and more of the coastline was being exposed to open ocean conditions.

Dr Ted Scambos is a sea ice expert at the University of Colorado Boulder who also works on Antarctic sea ice at the university’s National Snow and Ice Data Center – a world centre for monitoring ice at the poles.

He said the downturn in sea ice in Antarctica “is causing the scientific community to wonder if there’s a process that’s related to global climate change”.

Antarctica is hard to study not just because of its remoteness, but in the challenges of gathering data around a continent exposed to huge variations in wind and storms from all sides.

Scambos said: “Since 2016 there has been a fairly sharp downturn [in sea ice] and especially with these back-to-back record years as well as many months being at near record lows, it’s causing the scientific community to wonder if there’s a process related to global climate change.”

He said while the most recent record could be related partly to a La Niña climate system that tends to deliver warmer winds to the continent’s peninsular, that didn’t explain the losses in other areas.

“We’re still trying to get to grips with what’s different now,” he says. “But it’s clear that reduced sea ice will have an impact. It’s going to have an impact on the continental ice because so much of the coast will be exposed.”

For many years Antarctica had seemingly been confounding some climate models as sea ice had – on average – slightly increased until a crash in 2016.

Dr Ariaan Purich, a climate scientist at Monash University, looked at why the sea ice didn’t behave as some expected.

She said it was likely caused by changing winds and, counterintuitively, meltwater from the land entering the ocean that made it easier for ice to form.

One study suggested that a warming ocean had also contributed to the sudden 2016 drop in sea ice.

“All the models project that as the climate warms, we expect to see [Antarctic sea ice] decline,” she says. “There’s widespread consensus on that. So this low sea ice is consistent with what the climate models show.”

Antarctic scientists are now scrambling to work out what’s happening. Are the drops in sea ice and the back-to-back record lows just a natural phenomenon in a continent notoriously difficult to study? Or are these records another clear sign the climate crisis is beating down on the frozen continent?

“Antarctica might seem remote but changes around there can affect the global climate and the melting ice sheets affect coastal communities around the world,” says Purich.

“Everyone should be concerned about what’s happening in Antarctica.”

Map of Antarctica showing the duration in days of sea ice around the continent between February 2022 and February 2023 compared with the long-term average between 1981/82 and 2010/11. Red shows areas where ice was absent for longer than usual, and blue shows were ice was present for longer. Photograph: Dr Phil Reid, Bureau of Meteorology, Hobart: Data: Nasa