Midwinter 2026 In The Sea Off Of Antarctica, Featuring An Area Of Missing Sea Ice The Size Of France
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AYNSLEY O’NEILL: How unusual it is to see this lack of ice in midwinter?
TED SCAMBOS: Ordinarily, this area near the peninsula—that’s the part that points up toward South America on the map—that area to the west side of the peninsula has extremely low sea ice for mid-winter. There’s no ice forming along this very long coast on the western side, and that’s extremely unusual in the last 50 years or so of keeping records on Antarctica—and probably for a lot longer than that. What’s been going on is that there’s a very strong wind pattern that’s pushing warm air from the South Pacific into this part of Antarctica, and the ice simply isn’t forming. The other part of this, and it’s a little hard to know which comes first—they’re probably both happening together—the surface of the ocean is also unusually warm, and that also has to do with how the winds are pushing the ocean water around Antarctica.
Ordinarily that area in Antarctica would be frozen over completely, and everything would be adapting to the fact that there’s a big ice layer over the ocean. The climate would be a lot cooler on the coast, because the air has to come from the ocean, then cross a frozen ocean for hundreds of miles, and then hit the continent. Now you’re seeing this warm, moist air come straight off the ocean and hit the continent and dump a lot of snow.
The area south of South Africa has seen enough extra accumulation to mostly offset how much ice is being lost in some other parts of Antarctica, but we still think that there’s a slowly evolving catastrophe on the ice sheet in other parts of Antarctica. But for now the total mass is close to balanced for the last few years.
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O’NEILL: A lot of your work focuses on the Thwaites Glacier, which is the widest glacier on Earth, as I understand it. It’s in West Antarctica, and it’s sometimes referred to as the Doomsday Glacier. How is the Thwaites Glacier faring in 2026?
SCAMBOS: Unfortunately, it’s right at the center of this problem I’ve been talking about, with the warm ocean water reaching the coast of Antarctica. The glaciers adjacent to Thwaites are experiencing the same thing, and their losses are not insignificant. But the way the landscape is underneath the ice sheet makes Thwaites the critical glacier for losing a huge area of ice in Antarctica. I like to say that it’s a slow-moving catastrophe; it’s not a doomsday, it’s more of a doomed century or two. Still, the amount of sea level rise that will occur from the loss of ice in this area—and we think it’s already underway—the models are showing that we’re committed to losing the ice. It’s just a question of whether we’re fast enough to stretch out that loss to several thousand years versus dumb enough to keep warming the planet and seeing it collapse very quickly in a century or two.
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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/11072026/antarctica-missing-ice/