Record heat hit Jacksonville with its hottest July after the planet experienced the hottest day and hottest June on record, and now the heat is breaking low ice records in the Southern Hemisphere where it was in winter.
Sea ice in Antarctica is at its lowest point ever during winter at a time when the icecap should be at maximum size during the darkest and coldest month of September.
The icecap that covers the ocean around Antarctica hit a record-low surface area measured by US satellite data, and scientists fear the impact of climate change is increasing at the southern pole.
As the southern hemisphere transitions into spring, Antarctic sea ice had reached only a maximum size of 16.96 million sq km (6.55 million sq miles) by September 10, the US space agency, NASA, and the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) said on Monday.
“This is the lowest sea ice maximum in the 1979 to 2023 sea ice record by a wide margin,” said the NSIDC, a government-supported program at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
At one point this year, sea ice had dropped to 1.03 million sq km (more than 397,000 sq miles), smaller than the previous record low and an area roughly the size of Texas and California combined.
“It’s a record-smashing sea ice low in the Antarctic,” NSIDC scientist Walt Meier said in comments published by NASA.
Sea ice expands and shrinks with the seasons and the ice around Antarctica grew this winter at the slowest pace seen since satellite observation began in the 1970s.
In contrast to Arctic sea ice floating around the North Pole, most of Antarctica’s ice is on land, upward of three miles thick, and would raise global sea levels if it melted.
At the North Pole, Arctic sea ice likely reached its annual minimum extent on Sept. 19, 2023, making it the sixth-lowest year in the satellite record, according to researchers at NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).