Antarctica gained nearly 700 billion tonnes of ice – and the cause is the last thing you’d expect

East Antarctica gained a staggering 695 billion tonnes of ice between 2021 and 2023, temporarily reversing years of decline – and researchers say the cause was from something unexpected, thousands of miles away

Antarctica has gained an estimated 695 billion tonnes of ice over a two-year period, temporarily interrupting the continent’s long-term trend of mass loss.

Antarctica has been losing ice at an average rate of about 140.5 billion tonnes a year over the past two decades, according to satellite data. That’s the long-term trend and it’s not a good one, given what it means for sea level rise globally.

But scientists believe that between 2021 and 2023 something quite strange happened.

Instead of losing ice, the continent gained it – and not by a small amount either. According to fresh research, the Antarctic ice sheet put on roughly 695 billion tonnes of mass during that period, which the researchers say is the largest gain ever observed by the GRACE satellite missions.

What caused the massive addition of ice?

According to the team led by the Institute of Oceanology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the reason for the new addition of ice was down to something happening thousands of miles away in the tropics.

The scientists explained in a fresh study that a persistent patch of unusually warm water in a region called the tropical warm pool – where the western Pacific meets the eastern Indian Ocean – set off a chain of atmospheric changes that ended up dumping enormous amounts of snow on East