Antarctica’s ice loss is locked in, and extra snowfall won’t save it – that’s bad news for low-lying coastal areas elsewhere

A study in Nature Geoscience used a machine-learning model trained on hundreds of thousands of Antarctic ice-sheet simulations, checked against satellite gravity data since 2002, to conclude Antarctica will lose more ice than it gains this century even if warming is held to 1.5 degrees Celsius. The continent holds enough ice to raise global sea level about 190 feet, and roughly 100 million people currently live within one meter of sea level.

In a high-emissions scenario, the study finds a cascading effect where warming oceans thin ice shelves, which collapse and speed glacier flow into the sea, potentially adding 10 inches of sea-level rise from Antarctica alone by 2100, enough to permanently flood homes for more than 10 million people. Researchers say the three biggest uncertainties are how ice shelves respond to ocean warming, how ice slides over bedrock, and how fast the region warms.

The authors acknowledge their model can't account for factors like ice cracking or subglacial rivers, since those aren't in the existing simulations it trained on, meaning the real picture could still shift.

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