NASA satellites reveal more ice in Antarctica: What’s behind this phenomenon that seems to defy climate change?

Scientists have been warning that Antarctica has been losing ice mass at an alarming rate over the past couple decades. The consequences of which will raise sea levels around the world.

However, despite warming atmospheric and ocean temperatures, between 2021 and 2023 the frozen continent actually saw spectacular gains according to a new study published in the journal Science China Earth Sciences. Scientists caution though, this doesn’t mean that by some miracle climate change has gone into reverse. So, what happened?

What’s behind the ice gains in Antarctica that seems to defy climate change?

You might not think it would be so, but Antarctica is one of the driest places on Earth. However, because the atmosphere is warming, it can hold more moisture.

The anomaly of Antarctica gaining more ice can mainly be attributed to more precipitation in the form of snow and some rain falling over the continent.

“This isn’t particularly strange,” Tom Slater, a research fellow in environmental science at Northumbria University in the UK who wasn’t involved in the study told Live Science.

“In a warmer climate the atmosphere can hold more moisture — this raises the likelihood of extreme weather such as the heavy snowfall which caused the recent mass gains,” he explained.

Gains did not make up for 20 years of accelerating loses

Researchers from Tongji University in Shanghai tracked changes in the ice sheet covering Antarctica over more than 20 years using data from NASA. Between 2002, when the US space agency began monitoring the ice sheet with its Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite and subsequent space craft, and 2020, the continent experienced accelerating ice loss detail the team in their study.

The scientists found that the average loss up to 2010 was roughly 81 billion tons but that nearly doubled to 157 billion tons between 2011 and 2020. Then over a three-year period from 2021 to 2023, Antarctica gained about 119 billion tons per year of mass.

However, those abrupt gains did not make up for the losses over the previous 20 years. Furthermore, they were concentrated in four glaciers in eastern Antarctica, and “almost all of Antarctica’s grounded ice losses come from glaciers elsewhere which are speeding up and flowing into the warming ocean,” Slater noted.

He expects these gains to be temporary and according to more recent data he may be correct. Since the beginning of 2024, after the study period ended, the increase in the Antarctica ice sheet appears to have slowed and now levels are back to where they were in 2020 according to NASA.

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