Antarctica is losing ice -- that's certain

 

That's a lot of water

I'm providing a reference to a recent paper about the continuing loss of ice from the continent of Antarctica.

Antarctica Is Losing Ice the Size of Los Angeles Every Three Years

Nearly one-fourth of Antarctica's glaciers are undergoing aggressive melting.

Here's a major excerpt explaining what's going on and where the data is coming from.

"The ice sheet has been retreating from the grounding line at an average rate of 442 square kilometers per year. The most dramatic changes occurred in West Antarctica’s Amundsen Sea and Getz sectors, where glaciers retreated 10 to about 40 kilometers. Pine Island Glacier retreated 33 kilometers, Thwaites Glacier 26 kilometers, and Smith Glacier an extraordinary 42 kilometers.

“Where warm ocean water is pushed by winds to reach glaciers, that’s where we see the big wounds in Antarctica,” explained Rignot, who’s also a senior research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “It’s like the balloon that’s not punctured everywhere, but where it is punctured, it’s punctured deep.”

Researchers compiled data from multiple satellite missions, including the European Space Agency’s ERS-1/2 and Sentinel-1, Canada’s RADARSAT 1, RADARSAT 2 and RADARSAT Constellation Mission, Japan’s ALOS/PALSAR and ALOS/PALSAR-2, Italy’s COSMO-SkyMed, the German Aerospace Center’s TerraSAR-X and Argentina’s SAOCOM.

According to co-author Bernd Scheuchl, UC Irvine project scientist in Earth system science, the study represents a landmark achievement for NASA’s Commercial Satellite Data Acquisition program, marking the first major success involving commercial synthetic aperture radar data providers for polar research."

And then there's the troubling excerpt.

" “The flip side is that we should perhaps feel fortunate that all of Antarctica isn’t reacting right now, because we would be in far more trouble,” Rignot said. “But that could be the next step.”

That's not something to wish for.

E. Rignot,B. Scheuchl,J.B. Barre,V. Brancato,L. Charrier,H. Chen,E. Ciraci,A. Dinh,S. Herreid,S. Jeong,X. Li,T. Mitchell,Y. Mohajerani,S. Shamsian,V. Tolpekin,I. Velicogna, & M. Wollersheim, Thirty years of glacier grounding line retreat in Antarctica, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 123 (10) e2524380123, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2524380123 (2026).