Roger Pielke Jr. is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who writes at The Honest Broker on Substack.

Excerpt:

Two new studies show that the Earth's climate is far more complex than often acknowledged, reminding us of the importance of pragmatic energy and climate policies. One of them, led by researchers at China's Tongji University, finds that after years of ice sheet decline, Antarctica has seen a "surprising shift": a record-breaking accumulation of ice. The paper takes advantage of very precise measurements of Antarctic ice mass from a series of NASA satellites called GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment).

Since the first GRACE satellite was launched in 2002, Antarctica has seen a steady decline in the total mass of its glaciers. Yet the new study found the decline reversed from 2021 to 2023. Melting Antarctic ice contributes to global sea-level rise, so a reversal of melting will slow that down. Understanding the dynamics of ice mass on Antarctica is thus essential. The recent Antarctica shift makes only a small dent in the overall ice loss from 2022, but comes as a surprise nonetheless.

[Via: Pielke Jr.'s blog post Ice Surprises: At the South Pole, Wang et al. 2025 find a record accumulation of ice on the Antarctic ice sheet over the period 2021 to 2023, following a steady decrease from 2002 to 2021. The data comes from NASA's GRACE series of satellites, which have the ability to precisely measure ice mass. The figure below shows that the recent accumulation is small in the context of the multi-decadal decline, but is still characterized by the paper's authors as a "significant reversal." The paper makes no predictions of whether or how long the accumulation might continue.]

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A second new paper, a preprint now going through peer review, finds a similar change at the opposite end of the planet.
"The loss of Arctic sea ice cover has undergone a pronounced slowdown over the past two decades, across all months of the year," the paper's US and UK authors write. They suggest that the "pause" in Arctic sea ice decline could persist for several more decades.

[Via: Pielke Jr.'s blog post Ice Surprises:  At the other end of the planet, at the North Pole, a new preprint by England et al. identifies a "surprising, but not unexpected multi-decadal pause in Arctic sea ice loss."]