West Antarctica is headed for decades of rapid melting no matter how quickly humans cut greenhouse gas emissions, and 2023 shattered records for missing sea ice around the continent.
At its most expansive, Antarctic sea ice covers an area the size of Antarctica itself, doubling the size of the frozen continent. But the winter sea ice has been shrinking, and this year there was less ice than ever before, going back to when satellites started tracking annual ice extent around 1980.A trio of new scientific analyses about the loss of ice in Antarctica paint a picture of a continent in trouble.
And it's difficult for sea ice to recover after a bad year like this one. The water that doesn't freeze — the exposed ocean water — absorbs more heat than ice does, and that makes it more difficult for ice to re-form the next year. Scientists have warned for decades that, once the ice in West Antarctica begins to disintegrate, it will gain momentum and be very difficult, if not impossible, to reverse within a human lifetime. A new study finds that the runaway melting process is already underway.
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