The vast and deep Southern Ocean complicates efforts to single out the role of climate change in declining sea ice
CLIMATEWIRE | Antarctic sea ice shrank to an all-time record in February — the smallest it’s been since satellites started keeping tabs more than 40 years ago.
Warming is already affecting Antarctica in other ways, including accelerating ice loss from melting glaciers. But the region's sea ice is more complicated, and it hasn’t always behaved in predictable ways. Then, around the year 2014, the Antarctic trend abruptly reversed itself and the sea ice began rapidly declining. It hit a record-low minimum in 2017 and 2018, then rebounded slightly before hitting new records in 2022 and 2023.
At the same time, the effects of climate change are growing stronger — and they may be a factor in the recent declines. Because the Southern Ocean is very large and deep, it “takes a longer time to respond” to the influence of human-caused climate change than other ocean basins, said Liping Zhang, a NOAA scientist who has researched the Southern Ocean and Antarctic sea ice.
It’s possible that very strong natural climate fluctuations could continue to overwhelm the human-caused climate signal for a while longer, potentially resulting in another sea ice reversal down the road. Or it’s possible that Antarctic sea ice may continue to decline indefinitely as the warming signal grows stronger and stronger.
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