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At the beginning of March 1898, a Belgian research ship became stuck in the ice of Antarctica’s Bellingshausen sea. The Belgica ship and its crew — which included Roald Amundsen, who later became the first man to reach the South Pole — remained there for a year. Scientists aboard Polarstern, a German research ship currently in the same place, have a very different view: in the beginning of February 2023, the expedition leader said he had never seen the sea so destituted of ice. In 2023, on February 13th, sea ice across the Antarctic as a whole reached 1.91 million square kilometres (m km2), the lowest level since satellite records began in 1979.
The world is now, on average, 1.0-1.3 ºC hotter than it was before the Industrial Revolution. However, that change has not occurred evenly: the poles are warming faster than regions in the middle of the globe.
Sea-ice extent around Antarctica was relatively stable until 2014. It has been declining sharply since then. One study by a climatologist at America’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) considers that between 2014 and 2017 Antarctic sea ice receded three times as quickly as during any comparable period in the Arctic. Antarctic sea ice shrinks to a minimum during late February and early March, during the southern hemisphere’s summer. It hit record lows in 2022 and again now in 2023.
These changes have prompted much research into how global warming is affecting Antarctica. The biggest concern is over the enormous West Antarctic ice sheet, which is smaller but less stable than its eastern counterpart. Scientists say that it risks collapse if it melts beyond a certain point, which could result in a global sea-level rise of up to three metres. It is unlikely to happen any time soon, but increasing evidence of instability in Antarctica’s ice sheets is cause for concern.
(www.economist.com, 20.02.2023. Adaptado.)
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