This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Seen from space, Antarctica looks so much simpler than the other continents—a great sheet of ice set in contrast to the dark waters of the encircling Southern Ocean. Get closer, though, and you’ll find not a simple cap of frozen water, but an extraordinarily complex interplay between the ocean, sea ice, and ice sheets and shelves.
That relationship is in serious peril. A new paper in the journal Nature catalogs how several “abrupt changes,” like the precipitous loss of sea ice over the last decade, are unfolding in Antarctica and its