Fact check: Despite claims in old video, Antarctic ice melting, sea ice set record low

Kate S. Petersen, USA TODAY
·4 min read
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The claim: Antarctic sea ice at record high, ice sheet not melting

An April 15 Instagram video shows a clip from the 2016 movie "Climate Hustle" in which two skeptics of human-caused climate change talk about Antarctic ice.

"I have to laugh, pardon me for laughing, because the Antarctic ice cap is not melting," said Don Easterbrook, a professor emeritus at Western Washington University. "The average annual temperature there is 58 degrees below zero, there's not melting going on."

Judith Curry, former professor at Georgia Institute of Technology, says Antarctic sea ice extent – defined as the area of ocean occupied by a certain percentage of sea ice – is setting record highs.

The video's caption (direct link, archive link) describes Curry and Easterbrook as "having a laugh about the #GlobalWarming narrative that Antarctic ice is melting, when in fact, the opposite is occurring."

The post received more than 40,000 likes in less than two weeks.

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Our rating: False

The Antarctic ice sheet is melting, according to NASA. Antarctic sea ice recently reached a record low, though there is not a statistically significant increasing or decreasing trend in Antarctic sea ice extent.

Antarctic ice sheet melting

The Antarctic ice sheet, which sits on top of the continent, has lost an average of 150 billion metric tons of ice per year since 2002, according to NASA.

While the high-elevation interior of Antarctica has an annual average daily temperature of around negative 58 degrees Celsius (minus 72 degrees Fahrenheit), other areas have different temperature regimes. Antarctic ice sheet melting is concentrated on the warmer coasts, Catherine Walker, a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution glaciologist, previously told USA TODAY.

Fact check: Antarctica already melting, does not need to warm 100 degrees to lose ice

"The interior of the ice sheet is not melting significantly at this time, and no one has claimed otherwise," she said. "The coast is melting, because the ice there is at sea level where summer temperatures regularly rise above ... the melting point of ice. And it’s in contact with the ocean, which is also – obviously – warmer than the melting point of ice."

Also, even if an area has an average temperature that's below freezing, it can still have melting occur on individual days that rise above freezing, Walker said.

Antarctic sea ice set record low

Rather than setting a record high, Antarctic sea ice, which floats on the ocean around the continent, reached its lowest extent ever recorded this February, according to NASA. This previous record was set in 2022.

In January, Antarctic sea ice extent was the lowest on record for that month, according to National Snow and Ice Data Center. The extent in March was the second-lowest on record for that month.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center interactive sea ice tool shows that sea ice extent has also been tracking well below the 1981 to 2010 average throughout April. The record high for Antarctic sea ice was in 2014.

"Overall, the Antarctic sea ice experienced an increase in extent from 1979 to 2014, then over the next three years it experienced a rapid decrease that basically canceled out all the increases of the previous 35 years," Claire Parkinson, a NASA climate scientist told USA TODAY in an email. "It then rebounded a bit, before decreasing again and reaching a new record low this year."

Fact check: False claim that Arctic, Antarctic ice reached record highs

It's not clear yet if the recent lows are a sign of a broader trend.

“There is some discussion about the Antarctic sea ice undergoing a regime shift since 2016 toward a generally lower extent, and that maybe this could be a response to global warming,” Walt Meier, a sea ice scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, said in a NASA press release. “But it is hard to say at this point if it is a real shift and response to warming or just a temporal multi-year variation.”

The Instagram user who shared the post did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The video was also debunked by PolitiFact.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Fact check: Antarctic ice melting, sea ice set record low