A century after the Endurance sank, Antarctica is still a land of mysteries.
For more than 100 years, the wreck of the lost ship Endurance has sat untouched at the bottom of the icy Weddell Sea off the coast of Antarctica.
A century ago, the so-called heroic age of Antarctic exploration was nearing its end. Stretching from the late 1800s until about 1922, this period saw some of the first major explorations of an as-yet largely uncharted continent. Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen was the first to reach the geographic South Pole in 1911. Shackleton wanted to be the first person to cross the Antarctic continent by land, but was thwarted by the loss of the Endurance.
Some experts worry that severe, sustained warming could eventually drive unstoppable and irreversible changes on the Antarctic ice sheet, causing massive glaciers to collapse and generating catastrophic increases in global sea levels. That kind of future still appears to be a long way away—but scientists are viewing the possibilities with growing urgency.Its counterpart, the Arctic, is currently warming nearly three times as fast as the rest of the world.
It’s a different world today. The Antarctic Peninsula became one of the fastest-warming regions on the planet in the latter half of the 20th century. Temperatures on the Antarctic Peninsula rose by nearly 3 degrees Celsius—that’s more than 5 degrees Fahrenheit—between 1950 and 2000 alone. The most dramatic episode occurred in 2002. A site known as the Larsen B ice shelf—an enormous ledge of ice jutting out from the peninsula—captured international attention when it suddenly crumbled to pieces and disintegrated into the sea. The entire process took place in a matter of weeks, and scientists believe strong warming and melting in the region were to blame.
Hundreds of miles away, the geographic South Pole has become another Antarctic hot spot. Over the last three decades, recent research has found, the area has warmed at a rate nearly three times faster than the global average . Antarctica is much more susceptible to these kinds of natural fluctuations than the Arctic, Scambos noted. The Arctic is almost completely surrounded by large landmasses, such as Canada and Siberia, which keep it relatively isolated from the rest of the world. Antarctica, on the other hand, is surrounded by a vast, open sea that flows directly into the world’s other oceans.
Scientists haven’t yet investigated the exact influence of global warming on this particular incident—freak events do sometimes happen. But it’s a reminder of what the continent could become, perhaps within another 100 years, if global warming spirals out of control. “Even though the Weddell had sea ice on it, it was a loose pack—thinner and more spread out,” Scambos said. “Lots of gaps for the ship to maneuver in.”
Then, starting around 2014, the trend abruptly reversed itself, and the ice began dramatically declining . It hit a record low minimum in 2017, rebounded a bit in 2020, and then saw another record-breaker this year. And there’s likely another unexpected influence at play: the recovering Antarctic ozone hole, which has been gradually healing since world leaders agreed to phase out the use of ozone-depleting chemicals in the 1980s.
That makes it difficult to predict exactly what might happen to Antarctic sea ice over the next few decades. These losses have immense implications for human societies all over the world. Since 1992, Antarctica has raised global sea levels by around a third of an inch. That’s on top of the additional contributions from the Greenland ice sheet, melting mountain glaciers and the warming of the oceans, which causes seawater to expand.
It was one of the first scientific papers to call attention to the issue, according to Fricker, who gave a presentation to the American Geophysical Union in 2019 on the last 100 years of science in Antarctica. What’s driving these waters is yet another complicated question. General warming of the oceans might be part of it. But most of the warm water comes from deep currents flowing down from the tropics and bubbling back up in the Southern Ocean.
It’s pouring about 50 billion tons of ice into the ocean each year, and parts of it are becoming less stable over time . Thwaites is currently the subject of an international scientific collaboration aimed at better understanding the processes affecting its melting—one of the biggest Antarctic science missions in history.