Neue Forschungskataloge, wie sich mehrere „abrupte Veränderungen“, wie der steilen Verlust von Meereis in den letzten zehn Jahren

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 surrounding waters, reinforcing one another and threatening to send the continent past the point of no return — and flood coastal cities everywhere as the sea rises several feet.

We’re seeing a whole range of abrupt and surprising changes developing across Antarctica, but these aren’t happening in isolation,” said climate scientist Nerilie Abram, lead author of the paper. (She conducted the research while at Australian National University but is now chief scientist at the Australian Antarctic Division.) “When we change one part of the system, that has knock-on effects that worsen the changes in other parts of the system. And we’re talking about changes that also have global consequences.”

[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09349-5](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09349-5)