Overview
- Published in PNAS, the study assembles the first comprehensive circumpolar map of grounding-line migration from 1996 to 2025.
- Retreat is concentrated in West Antarctica’s Amundsen and Getz sectors and parts of the Antarctic Peninsula and East Antarctica, while most coastlines show little change.
- Pine Island, Thwaites and Smith glaciers retreated roughly 33 km, 26 km and 42 km respectively, exemplifying multi-kilometer pullbacks in key hotspots.
- Authors link much of the retreat to wind-driven incursions of warm ocean water beneath ice shelves, yet significant losses on the northeast Antarctic Peninsula remain unexplained.
- The dataset, built from agency and commercial synthetic-aperture radar—including NASA CSDA-supported assets—records an average loss of about 442 km² per year, roughly the area of Greater Los Angeles every three years.