(New Scientist) Antarctica is in crisis and we are scrambling to understand its future

If all our fear and uncertainty over climate change could be distilled into a single statistic, then arguably it was delivered to an emergency summit on the future of the Antarctic last month.

Nerilie Abram at the Australian National University, Canberra, opened her presentation with a slide headlined “Antarctic sea ice has declined precipitously since 2014, and in July 2023 exceeded a minus 7 sigma event”….As Abram’s slide sunk in, it was as if the whole room was holding its breath. Put simply, a minus 7 sigma event, meaning seven standard deviations below the average, should be all but impossible, says Ed Doddridge at the Australian Antarctic Program Partnership, who works with Abram.

It is “actually really hard to convey just how extreme this difference was, how extreme the low sea ice extent was”, he says. One way is to liken it to the concept of a one-in-100-year flood, for example. “If you run those sorts of statistics for Antarctic sea ice last year, you get a number somewhere between one in 7.5 million years and one in 700 billion years,” says Doddridge.

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Hundreds of researchers held an emergency summit on the future of Antarctica last month, as they scramble to understand the effects of the continent’s randomly disappearing sea ice https://t.co/Bi7bp3AZo8

— New Scientist (@newscientist) December 3, 2024