As rising temperatures continue to alter the Arctic’s landscape, scientists are now closely watching what is happening at the other end of the globe. Antarctic sea ice extent in January was the second-lowest on record, behind only the record-low extent of 2017.
Preliminary data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center suggests Antarctica will likely set a record this year for the lowest sea ice extent — the area of ocean covered by sea ice. On February 17, a daily reading of the sea ice around the continent dropped lower than the previous record minimum set in March 2017.
This means that the sea ice extent for Antarctica is now below the January 2022 reading.
“What’s going on in the Antarctic is an extreme event,” Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the University of Colorado Boulder and lead scientist at NSIDC, told CNN. “But we’ve been through this a bit.”
What he means by “this” is a roller coaster of sea ice extent over the past couple of decades, swinging wildly from record highs to record lows, explains CTV News Canada.
Keep in mind that in the Arctic, scientists say climate change is accelerating its impacts, while Antarctica’s sea ice extent is highly variable.
“There’s a link between what’s going on in Antarctica and the general warming trend around the rest of the world, but it’s different from what we see in mountain glaciers and what we see in the Arctic,” Scambos added.
Satellite data extends back to 1978 for both polar regions. And with Antarctica, the region was still producing record-high sea ice extent as recently as 2014 and 2015. In 2016, the sea ice extent began plunging and has done so ever since.
“That kind of drop is pretty much unprecedented in the record,” Marilyn Raphael, geography professor and director at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, told CNN. “Antarctic sea ice does vary from year to year, but that was a bigger variation than what normally happens.”
Despite the complex climate signals in Antarctica’s record low sea ice, scientists point out that the increasing warming trend in the polar regions amplifies the consequences of the crisis globally.
“Polar regions really have a way of making these small changes a bigger deal,” Scambos said, “either through sea-level rise, which is the main cause for concern from Antarctica, or through warmer climate generally, because the Arctic is sort of the air conditioner for the places where most of us live in the Northern Hemisphere.”
