'We were in disbelief': Antarctica is behaving in a way we've never seen before. Can it recover?

Look out over Antarctica in the summer, and time seems frozen. The South Pole's midnight sun appears to hover in place, never dropping below the horizon for weeks between November and January.

But the Antarctic’s timelessness is an illusion. Only a decade ago, on summer nights across the coast, the sun would glide ever so slightly over the ocean, dusting its ice floes in golden light.

Yet today, much of this sea ice is nowhere in sight. And scientists are increasingly alarmed that it may never come back.

"Antarctica feels very distant, but the sea ice there matters so much to all of us," Ella Gilbert, a polar climate scientist at the British Antarctic Survey, told Live Science. "It's a really vital part of our climate system."

Until recently, Antarctic sea ice fluctuated between relatively stable summer minimums and winter maximums. But after a record minimum in 2016, things began to shift. Two record lows soon followed, including the smallest minimum ever in February 2023 at just 737,000 square miles (1.91 million square kilometers).

As winter began in March of that year, scientists hoped the ice cover would rebound. But what happened instead astonished them: Antarctic ice experienced six months of record lows. At winter's peak in July, the continent was missing a chunk of ice bigger than Western Europe.

"We all thought that the minimum was as bad as it was going to get; it was 2023, not 2070," Ariaan Purich, an Antarctic climate researcher at Monash University in Australia, told Live Science. "So when winter came, we were in disbelief."