East Antarctica may hold its ice far longer than feared, new 100,000-year model suggests
The East Antarctic Ice Sheet may be far tougher in a warming world than scientists previously thought. A modelling study published on Friday, 30 October, in the journal Nature Climate Change found it could stay comparatively stable even if global temperatures rise more than 10 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
Researchers from the IBS Center for Climate Physics at Pusan National University in South Korea ran a coupled climate and ice-sheet model over 100,000 years at different carbon dioxide levels. Unlike most earlier studies, which fixed the atmosphere and ocean in advance, their model let the climate and the ice sheets change together.
The regions responded very differently. Warming of just over 2 degrees would cause major long-term loss from the marine-based West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which sits mostly on bedrock below sea level. Greenland would retreat steadily and disappear completely once warming passed about 6 degrees. East Antarctica, by contrast, stayed comparatively stable even beyond 10 degrees of warming.
The reason is the atmosphere itself. Warmer air holds more moisture, and a shift in the Southern Hemisphere’s westerly winds pushes more of it towards Antarctica, where much falls as snow over the high East Antarctic interior. Thicker cloud cover also blocks sunlight, slowing melting. Under the strongest warming, the Antarctic Ice Sheet lost about 70 percent of its volume when the model ignored these changes — but only about 20 percent with them included. “Our results demonstrate that the long-term future of an ice sheet cannot be understood from temperature alone,” said lead author Yun Kyung-Sook.
Why it matters
The Antarctic Ice Sheet holds roughly 58 metres’ worth of global sea-level rise. The study suggests part of that ice may be more resilient than feared — but it is not a clean bill of health. The same simulations show heavy losses from West Antarctica, and parts of East Antarctica are already retreating today.
What happens next
The researchers caution that this is a model result, not a measurement, and that their model has relatively coarse resolution. It cannot fully capture what happens beneath ice shelves or at individual outlet glaciers, where warm ocean water does much of its damage. Higher-resolution simulations will be needed to test how these atmospheric effects interact with ocean-driven melting.
This article is for general information and education only. It is not legal or financial advice.
Sources
- https://phys.org/news/2026-10-snowfall-clouds-east-antarctic-ice.html (phys.org, 30 October 2026)
- https://terraworldnews.com/en/news/2026/10/31/klima-ostantarktis-eisschild-schnee-wolken-nature-climate-change-2026-10-31 (Terra World News, 31 October 2026)
- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-026-02791-x (Nature Climate Change, 30 October 2026)
