Effects
- Planetary Boundaries & Tipping Points
- Extreme weather & event attribution
- ENSO: El Niño & La Niña
- Feedback effects of warming
- Wildfires increasing
- Antarctica melting
- Antarctic sea ice disappearing
- Arctic sea ice disappearing
- Greenland melting
- Ocean currents changing
- Oceans warming
- Ocean acidification
- Melting permafrost & burning ice
- New Zealand’s disappearing glaciers
- Black carbon & ash on snow
- Seasons changing
- How we know about past climates: proxy data
Home > Climate wiki > Effects > Antarctica melting
Summary
- Antarctica is almost twice the size of Australia and contains 90% of the world’s freshwater that, if it all melted, would add ~60-70m to sea levels.
- 125,000 years ago when temperatures and CO2 levels were similar to that of today, sea levels were ~6-10 metres higher than today.
- Over the past 50 years, the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula (Figs. 2 & 3) has been one of the fastest warming parts of the planet, with air temperatures five times the average rate of global warming due to polar amplification.
- The East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS)(Figs. 2 & 3) is not as stable as previously thought and is contributing to rising sea levels. Temperatures there reached 38.5°C above normal in 2022, a new world record for the largest temperature excess above normal ever measured at an established weather station.
- The Western Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) covers islands and land below sea level (Figs. 2-4), which makes it particularly vulnerable to collapse. The Thwaites Glacier is currently of greatest concern. Increasingly warmer ocean water is melting it from below, undercutting it so that it’s collapsing. Nicknamed the ‘Doomsday Glacier’, it acts like a plug, holding back the WAIS ice sheet.
The ‘Doomsday Glacier’ is poised to lose its ice shelf this year. – Live Science May 2026
Most projections of Antarctic ice loss omit fracture mechanics. Using an ice-sheet model that explicitly represents ice damage, we show that fractures accelerate ice flow and amplify sea-level contributions from West Antarctica by up to 4.5-fold by 2300. – Blasco et al July 2026
- See Wellington University’s Antarctic Research Centre for up-to-date research, and Copernicus: Ocean Climate Portal interactive user-friendly hub for understanding of the impact of climate change on oceans
Effects
- Planetary Boundaries & Tipping Points
- Extreme weather & event attribution
- ENSO: El Niño & La Niña
- Feedback effects of warming
- Wildfires increasing
- Antarctica melting
- Antarctic sea ice disappearing
- Arctic sea ice disappearing
- Greenland melting
- Ocean currents changing
- Oceans warming
- Ocean acidification
- Melting permafrost & burning ice
- New Zealand’s disappearing glaciers
- Black carbon & ash on snow
- Seasons changing
- How we know about past climates: proxy data
Home > Climate wiki > Effects > Antarctica melting
Summary
- Antarctica is almost twice the size of Australia and contains 90% of the world’s freshwater that, if it all melted, would add ~60-70m to sea levels.
- 125,000 years ago when temperatures and CO2 levels were similar to that of today, sea levels were ~6-10 metres higher than today.
- Over the past 50 years, the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula (Figs. 2 & 3) has been one of the fastest warming parts of the planet, with air temperatures five times the average rate of global warming due to polar amplification.
- The East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS)(Figs. 2 & 3) is not as stable as previously thought and is contributing to rising sea levels. Temperatures there reached 38.5°C above normal in 2022, a new world record for the largest temperature excess above normal ever measured at an established weather station.
- The Western Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) covers islands and land below sea level (Figs. 2-4), which makes it particularly vulnerable to collapse. The Thwaites Glacier is currently of greatest concern. Increasingly warmer ocean water is melting it from below, undercutting it so that it’s collapsing. Nicknamed the ‘Doomsday Glacier’, it acts like a plug, holding back the WAIS ice sheet.
The ‘Doomsday Glacier’ is poised to lose its ice shelf this year. – Live Science May 2026
Most projections of Antarctic ice loss omit fracture mechanics. Using an ice-sheet model that explicitly represents ice damage, we show that fractures accelerate ice flow and amplify sea-level contributions from West Antarctica by up to 4.5-fold by 2300. – Blasco et al July 2026
- See Wellington University’s Antarctic Research Centre for up-to-date research, and Copernicus: Ocean Climate Portal interactive user-friendly hub for understanding of the impact of climate change on oceans
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A first threshold, potentially as low as 1–2 °C above pre-industrial levels, triggers the long-term collapse of ~40% of marine ice volume in West Antarctica. Marine-based sectors in East Antarctica, representing ~5 m of potential sea-level rise, are at risk of losing stability at 2–5 °C. – Winkelmann et al 2026
2024 was warmest year on Earth since direct observations began… 1.62°C above our 1850-1900 average, making it the second year above 1.5°C. – Berkeley Earth, 2025-
Prof. Naish xplains what Antarctica may be melting faster than anyone realizes, and the implications for humanity are potentially disastrous
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Why Scientists Are Terrified About What They’re Finding Beneath Antarctica: New Scientist documentary
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Ice sheet: continental glaciers that have joined together to cover the surrounding land in an area greater than 50,000 km². There are only three in the world: Greenland, and two in Antarctica: the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS). The existence of these ice sheets are why we are still in an ice age.- Marine ice sheet: an ice sheet whose base is on ground below sea level. This makes it particularly vulnerable to undercutting by warming waters. The WAIS is largely a marine ice sheet.
- Outlet glacier: drains inland glaciers/ice sheets through gaps in the surrounding topography. If an outlet glacier reaches the coast (some terminate inland) it can become an:
- Ice shelf: a tidewater (coastal) glacier or ice sheet that flows down to a coastline and onto the ocean surface, where it floats. Pine Island and Thwaites Glaciers are outlet glaciers with ice shelves; the Thwaites ice shelf is now breaking up (May 2026).
- Grounding line: the point where the bottom or ‘basal’ (bottom) side of a glacier leaves land and extends out over the ocean (Processes | Fig. 1).
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Antarctica showing the Larsen and Wilkins Ice Shelves, Pine Island Glacier, and Thwaites Glacier — an ice shelf roughly the size of UK (176 x103 km2). The front of the glacier—its terminus—is nearly 120km wide and >1000m below sea level.
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The West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) sits largely on islands and underwater trenches. This makes it particularly vulnerable to undercutting and collapse.
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Image: Lau et al; 2023.
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Bottom up melting from warmer deep ocean waters: Pushed by westerly winds, which are strengthening with climate change, the warm deep (400-700m) saltier layers of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current are pushing closer to the shoreline. This warm water eats away at the underside of ice shelves (which can be well over 1km deep), thinning them from below. Continued undercutting allows more water to travel further under the ice shelf, eroding it and thinning it until it’s detached from the ‘grounding line’ and the ice begins to float.As the thinning glacier becomes more buoyant, instead of being part of a solid ice mass, it floats at the calving front so it’s pushed up and down with the tides. These forces travel up the length of the glacier, ultimately causing the leading edge to break at the weakest point. Because the glacier is thinner at the front, the slope is steeper so the glacier speeds up due to gravity, allowing huge volumes of ice to surge downstream and into the sea (Fig. 1).
- If the grounding line is below sea level, the glacier is prone to undercutting by increasingly warmer ocean waters (Fig. 1).
- If land slopes down inland instead of rising upwards, warm ocean currents water flow further beneath the glacier, eroding it and further destabilising it (Fig. 1). Thwaites Glacier, now considered the most unstable is grounded below sea level, and much of the the land behind the grounding line slopes down.
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The ice is normally stabilized by sitting on the seafloor. As warm ocean currents eat away at the base, the ice thins, lifts away from the seafloor and breaks, losing its ability to act as a brake on the flow of ice from the continent. Click the image for the interactive webpage.
A small imbalance of forces caused by some perturbation can cause a substantial non-linear response. – Prof. Terry Hughes, ‘The Jakobshavn Effect’
Or as Prof. Jason Box puts it:
There are too many variables that determine exactly when a glacier calves. A single cracking event could conceivably be triggered by a seagull, acting like the straw that broke the camel’s back.
The top down melting was proposed by Jay Zwally when researching the sudden acceleration of the Jakobshavn Isbræ glacier on the west coast of Greenland. Warm air melted ice into giant meltwater lakes on the surface of ice shelves. Because the darker pools have a lower albedo like the ocean, they absorb more heat than the surrounding ice, causing more warming and hence further melting in a self-reinforcing positive feedback effect.
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Image: NASA/Goddard/Maria-José Viña
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Brief history of trying to predict what could—and now is—happening
1968: glaciologist John Mercer voiced concerns that the West Antarctic Ice Shelf (WAIS) could abruptly collapse, leading to a rapid rise in sea levels because the WAIS contains enough ice to add 3.3m to global sea levels:
A disquieting thought is that if the present highly simplified climatic models are even approximately correct, this deglaciation (of the WAIS) may be part of the price that must be paid in order to buy enough time for industrial civilisation to make the changeover from fossil fuels to other sources of energy. – ‘Antarctic Ice and Sangamon Sea Level’, International Association of Scientific Hydrology Symposium 79, pp217–225, 1968 (PDF)
1978: In spite of the geological evidence that past climate change has led to abrupt sea level rise, the notion that a few degrees of warming could have any impact on the coldest place on Earth was largely dismissed:
Mercer’s views, first buried in a publication of the International Association of Scientific Hydrology, caught the attention of policy makers when published in 1978 in Nature under the title ‘West Antarctic ice sheet and CO2 greenhouse effect: A threat of disaster’ … By the late 1980s the notion that loss of ice shelves could lead to disintegration of the entire ice sheet fell out of favour. – Oppenheimer, 2004.
1995: Larsen A Ice Shelf on the Antarctic Peninsular (northern tip of WAIS)—one of the fastest warming areas on the planet—broke apart.
2002: Its neighbour, the Larsen B Ice Shelf, disintegrated in spectacular fashion in just six weeks, not hundreds of years as previously assumed (Video 4):
It was sitting there stable for 10,000 years and then it was just…gone. – Dr. Jeremy Bassis.
2008: We see things today that five years ago would have seemed completely impossible, extravagant, exaggerated. – Eric Rignot, JPL/NASA in The big thaw, National Geographic
2009: In spite of observations and the growing evidence that similar dramatic ‘non-linear’ abrupt changes to glaciers were being seen in Greenland, the 2009 IPCC 4th Assessment Report stated that sea levels were not likely to be greatly affected by melting glaciers, either from Antarctica or anywhere on Earth, in the twenty-first century. Indeed, the report stated that the continent was ‘too cold for widespread surface melting and is expected to gain in mass due to increased snowfall.’
Meanwhile Pine Island Glacier the fastest melting glacier in Antarctica that drains about 10% of the WAIS, was already thinning and accelerating.2017: A section of Larsen C broke off as a single 5,800 km2 berg. The scientific scramble to understand these events, which failed to be predicted by the climate models, had in fact been underway since 1986, with similar abrupt collapses being seen in Greenland.2018: Massive chunks broke off Pine Island Glacier (Video 6). Then more broke off in 2020.-
The fastest moving glacier in Antarctica is being undercut by warm ocean currents, causing its grounding line to retreat for the same reasons as the much larger Thwaites Glacier.
2021: The massive Thwaites Glacier ice shelf was projected to collapse before 2030 because the Jakobshavn effect observed in Greenland was also happening here, particularly to the eastern section of the shelf (Video 5).2022-23: The Hektoria Glacier has lost half of its ice, some 25km, between January and March (Video 7).-
The International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration: scientists are investigating whether Thwaites Glacier may collapse in the next few decades or centuries, and how this could affect future global sea-level rise.
2023: Researchers discovered that a particular species of octopus was traversing open water where much of the WAIS now rests (Maps 2 & 3 show what an open water passage would look like.)Using genetic analyses of a type of circum-Antarctic octopus, Pareledone turqueti, Lau et al. showed that the WAIS collapsed completely during the last interglacial period, when global sea levels were 5 to 10 meters higher than today and global average temperatures were only about 1°C warmer. – Science Editorial, 2023
2024:
Satellite data show that seawater is being flushed beneath the grounding zone of Thwaites Glacier by the tides, perhaps as far as 12 km, triggering vigorous melting. As ocean temperatures increase, this tidal pumping mechanism may lead to runaway melting under many areas of the Antarctic Ice Sheet. This recently-highlighted process could potentially double sea-level rise from Antarctica.
Current models used to generate global projections of sea-level rise, such as those that informed the last IPCC report (2022), do not adequately represent this process, meaning that future sea-level rise from Antarctica may be substantially underestimated. – UNESCO State of the Cryosphere 2024
2026: Collapse of Thwaites Glacier ice shelf now underway (Video 8):
“Suddenly, large areas are just falling to pieces,” says Christian Wild, from the University of Innsbruck in Austria. “It looks like a windscreen that’s shattering….It’s essentially in free fall now,” Wild added, noting the pace has quickened further over the past five months – New Scientists 18 May 2026
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New Scientist:;The Thwaites ‘Doomsday’ Glacier’s Ice Shelf is About to Break Away, May 2026
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Until a few years ago, the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS), which contains enough ice to raise global sea levels ~54m if it all melted, was considered relatively stable. This was in part due to the bulk of the icecap sitting on land rather than the seabed (Map 2). However, measurements using satellite records from 1979 to 2017 show that the EIAS had contributed about 30% to rising sea levels during this period, in part because as the climate warmed, stronger polar westerly winds were pushing more of the warmer circumpolar deep water current toward outlet glaciers, undercutting them (Fig. 1 and Video 9).
These outlet glaciers with ice shelves behave in the same way as the WAIS outlet glaciers, however they hold back the far larger EAIS. In 2022, this led to the abrupt collapse of the Conger Ice Shelf.
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The ice is normally stabilized by sitting on the seafloor. As warm ocean currents eat away at the base, the ice thins, lifts away from the seafloor and breaks, losing its ability to act as a brake on the flow of ice from the continent. Click the image for the interactive webpage.
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Prof. Matt King, Director of the Australian Centre for Excellence in Antarctic Science outlines the changes and surprises emerging from East Antarctica and the massive reduction in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current.
In 2017, other researchers found more than 65,000 meltwater lakes on the EAIS. While most lakes were found on outlet glaciers, thousands were seen up to 50km inland on the ice sheet, and as high as 1500m altitude (Figs. 3 & 4). For inland and high altitude lakes to form, surface temperatures need to be well above freezing, and for sustained periods. These may not play as large a role as the warm deep waters along the WAIS, but they are also being seen on the southern coasts of the EIS, which is also vulnerable to warm deep waters (Fig. 4a).
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‘Top down’ melting on the EAIS. Click on the image to see the full report; Image: Stokes et al.
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“Location and density of supraglacial lakes (SGLs) in East Antarctica, alongside examples. (a) Location of 65,459 mapped lakes that appeared on imagery from January 2017, each marked by a red cross. (b) Lake density map showing the cumulative area of SGLs within 1 km2 cells using a 50 km search radius. (c,d) Sentinel 2A satellite image (12th Jan 2017) of the high density of lakes on the Jutulstraumen Glacier, Dronning Maud Land. Note that lakes have developed above and beyond the grounding line (thick black line), but there is a clustering of lakes 5–10 km down-ice from the grounding line. (e,f) Sentinel 2A satellite image (27th Jan 2017) of clusters of lakes towards the ice sheet margin in Kemp Land.” (Stokes et al., click on the image to see the full report).
For reasons explained in Video 10, these may not play as large a role as the warm deep waters along the WAIS, but they are also being seen on the southern coasts of the EIS, which is also vulnerable to warm deep waters (Fig. 4a).
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How hidden lakes threaten Antarctic Ice Sheet stability
About 400,000 years ago…the global temperature was 1 to 2 degrees Celsius greater. Data indicate[s] that the ice sheet margin at the Wilkes Basin (EAIS) retreated to about 700 kilometres inland from the current position, which—assuming current ice volumes—would have contributed about 3 to 4 metres to global sea levels. – Blackburn et al, July 2020
Recently, relatively warm waters that are normally found offshore are coming onto the Antarctic continental shelves, threatening the stability of East Antarctic ice shelves. – Ribeiro et al, 2023Totten Glacier hosts the most rapidly thinning ice in East Antarctica. This record of thinning is due to rapid melt along the grounding line of the Totten Ice Shelf (TIS), where warm ocean water from the open ocean flows into ice shelf cavities… – Nakayama et al, 2023The loss of the Conger–Glenzer ice shelf in 2022 was the culmination of a multidecadal process of disintegration, signalling East Antarctica may not be as stable as we once thought. – Walker et al, 2024 -
More information
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Arctic or Polar Amplification are terms used to describe why the poles are warming far faster than the rest of the planet. There are several reasons for this:
Image: Nathan Kurtz / NASA - The Albedo Effect: Clean ice and snow have a very high albedo, that is, they reflect up to 90% of solar radiation back into space. The ocean is much darker, so it has a very low albedo, reflecting only about 6% of the incoming solar radiation and absorbing the other 94%, warming it much faster than the snow and ice. This feedback effect then leads to more warming, then more melting, and so on.
- Ozone-depleting substances (this is a new area of research: see here for how this is happening).
- Air pressure differences between the tropics and the poles may also be a factor: warmer (and therefore denser, higher pressure) air tends to travel from the tropics to the cooler (lower pressure less dense air) poles (see 5-min. Video 1 here). However, weather systems are stalling as the jet stream wobbles. While this allows cold arctic air to move further south for longer periods, it also allows warmer tropical air to invade polar latitudes. A very small rise in temperatures for long periods is leading to dramatic melting in Greenland and Arctic sea ice, as well as Antarctica.
- Climate system feedbacks have also changed ocean currents as well as the weather associated with them.
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Clean ice and snow have a very high albedo, that is, they reflect up to 90% of solar radiation back into space The ocean is much darker, so it has a very low albedo, reflecting only about 6% of the incoming solar radiation and absorbing the other 94%, warming it much faster than the snow and ice (Fig. 5).As more ice forms, the water is cooler, leading to more ice forming, and so on, in a feedback effect. However,
Recent global temperature surge intensified by record-low planetary albedo – Science, 05 Dec. 2024 (Figs. 6 & 7)
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Image: Nathan Kurtz / NASA
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Image: Duspayev et al; Earth’s Sea Ice Radiative Effect from 1980 to 2023
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Image: Eliot Jaboson; data: NASA
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Firstly, not all of the WAIS is below sea level (Maps 1-3). And most importantly ice shelves that are anchored to bedrock act as dams or buttresses that hold back ice sheets that are entirely on the land. If they break up, this allows ice sheets to flow into the ocean.
Secondly, glaciers and ice caps that sit below sea level do not contribute to sea-level rise until they melt, as the water in them is stored in a concentrated form (ice) in relatively small locations: in this case, Antarctica is storing water as ice that’s many kilometres thick. When it melts, instead of staying in this massive column of ice over Antarctica, the water is distributed across all of the world’s oceans. How much this and other factors contribute to sea levels rising, is covered here.
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- World Glacier Monitoring Service
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