Antarctica is gaining ice, so warming is fake
Satellite gravity and altimetry measurements show Antarctica has been losing land ice mass overall since the early 2000s, with West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula losing ice rapidly even though East Antarctica's interior has shown modest and regionally variable gains that do not offset the continent-wide net loss.
What we know
Claims that Antarctica is gaining ice, rather than losing it, are usually based on real but selectively presented data, since different parts of the Antarctic ice system behave differently and even move in opposite directions in some measurements. The overall continent-wide trend, however, as measured by independent satellite systems over more than two decades, shows a clear and accelerating net loss of land ice mass.
NASA and European Space Agency satellite missions, including GRACE and GRACE Follow-On (which measure ice mass through detection of subtle changes in Earth's gravity field) and ICESat and ICESat-2 (which measure ice sheet elevation via laser altimetry), have tracked Antarctic ice mass since the early 2000s. A comprehensive assessment published in 2018 in Nature by the Ice Sheet Mass Balance Inter-comparison Exercise, involving 84 scientists from 44 international institutions, found that Antarctica lost ice at an average rate of about 43 billion metric tons per year from 1992 to 1997, but that this rate accelerated to about 219 billion metric tons per year from 2012 to 2017, a roughly fivefold increase in the rate of loss over that 25-year period. More recent NASA and NOAA analyses continue to show sustained net mass loss through the 2020s.
The geographic pattern within Antarctica explains much of the confusion behind this claim. West Antarctica, including the Amundsen Sea sector containing the Thwaites and Pine Island glaciers, is losing ice rapidly, driven primarily by warm ocean water intruding beneath floating ice shelves and melting glaciers from below, a process distinct from surface melting from warm air. The Antarctic Peninsula has also warmed significantly and lost ice mass. East Antarctica, which holds the vast majority of the continent's total ice volume, has shown more complex behavior: some interior regions have seen modest snowfall-driven mass gains in certain measurement periods, partly because a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture and produce more snowfall in very cold interior regions where temperatures remain far below freezing regardless. However, this interior gain has been consistently smaller than the losses from West Antarctica and the Peninsula in every comprehensive continent-wide assessment, meaning the net trend for Antarctica as a whole is negative.
Sea ice, which forms and melts seasonally on the ocean surface around Antarctica, is a separate measurement from land ice mass and has shown high year-to-year variability, including a period of near-record extent around 2014 followed by a sharp decline to record lows in 2022 and 2023, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. This sea ice variability is sometimes conflated in public discussion with the land ice mass trend, but the two are physically distinct measurements: sea ice extent does not directly indicate whether the continent's land-based ice sheet, the volume relevant to long-term sea level rise, is gaining or losing mass.
The scientific consensus, reflected in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Sixth Assessment Report, is that Antarctica is a net contributor to global sea level rise and that this contribution has been accelerating, a conclusion drawn from multiple independent satellite measurement techniques that agree closely with one another despite measuring different physical properties of the ice sheet.
Common claims
- Antarctica is gaining ice, which disproves global warmingFalse - land ice is shrinking rapidly; sea ice recently hit record lows
- Antarctic sea ice was increasing for yearsPartially true historically, but irrelevant to warming debate and now reversed
- NASA satellites confirm Antarctica is losing land iceTrue - about 150 billion tonnes per year on average 2002-2023