Image by AlKalenski from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
Something huge is happening around Antarctica and the experts didn’t see it coming
More than a million square kilometers of ice has gone:
Since 2015, the continent has shed sea ice equivalent to the area of Greenland. Researchers call it the largest environmental shift detected anywhere on Earth in recent decades.
–– Earth.com
Everything about Antarctica has defied the experts. For years Antarctica sea ice expanded when it wasn’t supposed to. Then, suddenly in 2016 the sea ice around Antarctica dramatically started to shrink, and that wasn’t supposed to happen either. Scientists wondered at the time if it was just a temporary blip, but then it got even smaller. Holes in the sea ice “as big as Switzerland” have started to appear for the first time since the mid 1970s.
To explain this mystery (that was rarely mentioned) a new paper suggests the salinity of surface waters has changed. We’re not just talking about a small piece of ocean, this is everything south of 50°. For decades, the surface of the polar Southern Ocean was getting less salty — an “expected response to a warming climate” […]
via JoNova
July 3, 2025 at 01:19AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 