West Antarctica is missing way too much ice

Photograph : Sebnem Coskun/Getty images

From Wired by Graham Readfearn

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Temperatures have climbed up to 45 degrees Fahrenheit above normal, stopping ice from forming in the dead of Antarctic winter.

ANTARCTICA’S WEST COAST is missing an area of winter sea ice the size of France, sparking concerns for threatened penguins other marine life and global sea levels.

The Bellingshausen Sea is off the coast of West Antarctica. (NASA)

 

One expert said the loss of ice in the Bellingshausen Sea was “depressing” and the failure of ice to form could have intensified a heatwave over the continent’s peninsular last week that saw daytime temperatures peak at 15.4 degrees Celsius which is more than 20 degrees Celsius above average.

It’s winter in Antarctica, when sea ice expands rapidly around the continent peaking in September.

But satellite observations showed the Bellingshausen Sea—on the west side of the Antarctic peninsular and which by June would usually be covered by ice—was almost completely ice free.

Scientists said the region was missing about 650,000 square kilometers (250,000 square miles) of sea ice, compared with the average between 1991 and 2020.
That is an area about the size of France and almost tenfold the size of Tasmania.

“I’m concerned. It’s depressing,” said Dr Will Hobbs, an Antarctic sea ice expert at the University of Tasmania with the Australian Antarctic Program Partnership.

“It is remarkable that we are in June, and there is no sea ice there.”

He said this was the third time in four years that sea ice had been very low in the region.
“I don’t think we will see sea ice there any more.
It’s done,” he said.

He said the loss of sea ice was likely linked to changes in the ocean and scientists were trying to understand if global heating was a factor.

He said the region was important for krill—a critical part of the food web for species in the region.
Krill would usually be hiding from predators under the ice in winter, where they graze on algae.

On June 10 there was about 11.4 m square kilometers of sea ice around the entire continent compared to a long-term average for that date of 12.6 m square km.

Dr. Phil Reid, who monitors Antarctic conditions at Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology, said the Bellingshausen Sea had seen “incredible coastal exposure” in winter and summer in recent years.

He said just to the area’s west were the Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers—the continent’s major contributors to ice loss and sea level rise.

Floating ice shelves in front of the glaciers could break up faster if protective sea ice is absent for longer periods, he said, and this could then speed up the loss of ice from the glaciers, pushing up global sea levels in the future.

The Bellingshausen Sea’s coastline was the site of tragedy in late 2022 when thousands of emperor penguin chicks died during a “catastrophic breeding failure” in four colonies.

View image in fullscreen-Satellite observations show a large area of sea ice in west Antarctica over the Bellingshausen Sea has failed to appear this winter. 

Deep red indicates at least a 50% loss in sea ice compared with the 1991 to 2020 average. 

Illustration: Phil Reid/Bureau of Meteorology/National Snow and Ice Data Center

 

That event contributed to UN advisers pushing the species up two categories to “endangered” on its international threatened species list earlier this year.

Dr. Peter Fretwell, a scientist at the British Antarctic Survey who has been documenting the penguin’s decline, said the current loss of sea ice in the region was “a serious problem for penguins, especially emperors.”
“Sea ice is forming too late and breaking up too early.
It leads to reduced breeding success and longer trips to molting grounds.”

Adelie penguin numbers were also falling and crabeater seals were being forced to migrate in summer to find stable ice, he said.

The extent of ice at Antarctica, as of June 11, 2026. (Supplied: NSIDC)

 

This month the Antarctic peninsular witnessed an extreme temperature spike over several days.
Hobbs said while “nobody has done the numbers” it was reasonable to suggest the heat wave was “made worse by the lack of sea ice.”

Sea ice would usually help to cool any warmer airflow entering the region from the north, he said.

Officials at Argentina’s national weather service, Servicio Meteorológico Nacional, said the country’s Esperanza base at the peninsular’s northeastern tip had experienced an “extreme temperature event” that peaked on June 5 and 6.

Maximum temperatures of 15.4 degrees Celsius and 13.4 degrees Celsius, respectively, were recorded at a period when average daily maximums were minus 6.2 degrees Celsius.
The previous June temperature record at the base of 13.3 degrees Celsius was set on June 12, 1998.

 

Links :

• The Guardian : Antarctica’s west coast missing an area of sea ice the size of France as temperatures peak 20C above average 
• LiveScience : Antarctica’s sudden sea ice loss is one of the most extreme and confusing events in the modern climate record. Scientists now know why it's happening. 

France & misc. (SHOM) layer update in the GeoGarage platform

 

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A new species of tiny octopus was discovered in the Galápagos Islands

Courtesy Charles Darwin Foundation

From Wired by Marta Musso

An octopus about the size of a golf ball was first spotted in 2015 near Darwin Island.
A new study gives it both a formal description and a name.

A TINY BLUE octopus that lives in the deep sea off the coast of the Galápagos Islands is so small that it can fit in the palm of a hand.
And as a team of researchers coordinated by Chicago's Field Museum announced in a new study just published in the journal Zootaxa, it now has an official name—Microeledone galapagensis.

The octopus was first spotted in 2015 during a deep-sea expedition aboard the research vessel E/V Nautilus.
From there, marine biologists used a remotely operated underwater vehicle (RoV) to explore the ocean floor near Darwin Island, at the northern end of the Galápagos archipelago.
As the RoV's camera moved across the seafloor near an underwater slope at a depth of 1,773 meters (5,817 feet), they noticed the tiny octopus with its vibrant blue coloring.

By performing a close inspection, the researchers were able to recover the blue octopus and film two other specimens, and then, at the end of the mission, conduct a thorough analysis.
It left them puzzled, however, as they were not certain which species it belonged to.
So they contacted Field Museum expert Janet Voight, sending her a photo of the animal.
“Right away, I knew it was something really special,” said Voight, lead author of the new study.
“I’d never seen anything like it.” However, to determine whether an animal belongs to a new species requires a complete analysis of all its body parts, and since the blue octopus was the only one of its kind ever collected, the experts did not want to dissect and thus lose such a valuable specimen.

To overcome this problem, the authors used x-ray computed tomography to create and assemble thousands of CT micro-scans, which then allowed them to create a 3D model of the blue octopus, both internally and externally.
The researchers were able to observe the most minute details, from the tentacles (squat, with few suckers) to the smooth skin (almost devoid of pigment on the back) to a specific funnel-shaped organ, thus obtaining the information needed to classify it as a new species and place it among other cephalopods.
"Because CT imaging is nondestructive, it's especially important for type specimens like this one," said coauthor Stephanie Smith.
“And that's great for me, because people are often bringing me these incredibly rare and stunningly beautiful specimens that I get the privilege of virtually opening up.”

In addition to describing the new species, the blue octopus reminds us how much we still don't know about the ocean depths, how crucial these expeditions and research are to better understand these still unexplored ecosystems, and why protecting them is so important.

“These are little octopuses that live in the deep sea, and hardly anybody on Earth has ever gotten to see them.
I just feel lucky that I got to work with them,” said Voight.
“If you took all the land on Earth and pieced it together, you would not cover the Pacific Ocean.
The oceans are so big, and there’s so much left to explore.”

This startup raised $43M to build a hive mind for ships

From TechCrunch by Sean O'Kane

Oceans — to state the obvious — are big.
That makes it hard for governments, shipping companies, and insurance providers to know exactly what’s happening on them at any particular moment.
It doesn’t help that modern-day ships often aren’t equipped with modern technology or the right software behind those sensors to properly analyze what they see.

Quartermaster, an Arlington, Virginia-based startup, is building a solution to this problem that it calls “SmartMast.” It’s quite literally a package of weather-hardened sensors like cameras and radios that go on a ship’s mast and can relay real-time maritime data.
Combined with an analytics platform that can interpret all that information, Quartermaster refers to it as a “continuous, distributed sensing network” — a hive mind for millions of ships.

SmartMast is far more advanced than the current standard known as AIS, or the “automatic identification system,” according to Quartermaster CEO and founder Neil Sobin.
AIS is very basic and more or less consists of relayed location pings.
It’s also vulnerable.
Sobin says Quartermaster’s tech will be less susceptible to fraud, which can be a big problem on the high seas.

“In maritime, AIS is a completely broken system. It’s opt-in, [you] enter your own data, and if you want to do anything nefarious on the ocean, from petty smuggling all the way up to sanctions evasion, you can simply opt out of the system, or spoof it,” he said in an exclusive interview with TechCrunch.
“You can take advantage of just how fragile it is.”

Sobin has spent recent weeks repeating this pitch to investors, and they rewarded him with a $43 million Series A funding round.
The investment, which Quartermaster announced, was co-led by First Round Capital and Quiet Capital, a VC firm that backs “remarkable founders from day zero.”

First Round partner Bill Trenchard, who led Uber’s seed round in 2010 and is an investor in Flexport, said in a statement that Quartermaster is “reshaping how maritime operators understand and act on the world’s oceans.”

“Most attempts to bring intelligence to the ocean have run into the same wall: The cost of bespoke hardware does not scale to a planet that is mostly water.
Neil and his team have solved that,” he said.

Quartermaster says more than 600 ships using SmartMast have covered 10 million square miles of ocean to date.
The primary goal is to create an infrastructure layer for intelligence applications — identifying other ships, collecting training data for companies working on marine autonomy, aiding scientists and robotics experts, and providing data and insights to governments.

In Sobin’s eyes, there’s almost no limit to how Quartermaster’s system can be used, and the company’s already turning up new applications of the tech.
For instance, the company said SmartMast-equipped ships have already assisted in “over 20 rescues of mariners at sea.” That’s not a revenue-driving opportunity, but Sobin said Quartermaster is constantly thinking about ways to make life better for mariners, especially because it may win more customers.

“That is work we’re really proud of, but also [those are] the dynamics that help us lock in our network, you know, and create that incentive for mariners to work with us in this way,” he said.
“Our approach is to be pro-mariner and to create incentive for the mariner, and I think very few others will figure out how to operate that model as successfully as we have.
I think there are a bunch of players in the market who try to sell a sensor to a boat, try to sell a sensor to a fleet operator, and I think those are really challenging pitches to make, because fleet operations are low-margin businesses.”

As for the funding, Sobin said he expects a large chunk of it will be put toward hiring engineers to keep pushing Quartermaster’s tech forward.
While that money will help, Sobin also thinks the opportunity will just be too good for some engineers to pass up.

“The ocean has so much low-hanging fruit in computer vision tasks,” he said.
For engineers at social media companies, or AI labs, it’s “hard to feel the reward of all of your effort.
On the ocean, a single engineer can come in and make a significant impact in relatively short periods of time, simply because no one has worked on the space before.”