The seventh continent of the world, Antarctica, is experiencing a once-in-2,000-year event due to worsening climate change.
According to Indy100, the Antarctic region has lost sea ice 10 times the size of the UK, which research revealed happens only once in 20 centuries.
Researchers from the British Antarctic Survey used the CMIP6 climate dataset to learn about the loss of sea ice in the Antarctic and found that the sea ice levels shrank to historically low levels in 2023.
The sea ice, which has been increasing steadily till 2015, is now melting at an alarming level because of climate change.
Lead author Rachel Diamond said, “This is the first time this large set of climate models has been used to find out how unlikely 2023’s low sea ice actually was. We only have forty-five years of satellite measurements of sea ice, which makes it extremely difficult to evaluate changes in sea ice extent. This is where climate models come into their own.”
“According to the models, the record-breaking minimum sea ice extent would be a one-in-a-2000-year event without climate change. This tells us that the event was very extreme, anything less than one-in-100 is considered exceptionally unlikely,” she added.
Moreover, researchers also studied how long it would take to recover the loss, and they found that even 20 years is not enough for the return of the same level of sea ice as it was before 2023 and warned that the loss of ice would impact local and global weather and on unique Southern Ocean ecosystems, including whales and penguins.
