By Erin Wayman
Antarctica is a land of extremes: the driest, windiest, coldest place on Earth. The ice sheet that blankets the continent is, on average, 2 kilometers thick and covers nearly 14 million square kilometers. Antarctica is so remote and so isolated that as recently as 2007 scientists thought that it might be unaffected by global warming.
That year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded in its Fourth Assessment Report that Antarctica was the only continent where anthropogenic temperature change had not been detected. In contrast to the Arctic, the report said, ice in the far south wasn’t experiencing alarming, widespread melting. Some data even suggested that the continent was moderately cooling. “As best we knew,” says David Bromwich, a climate scientist at Ohio State University, “there was not much changing.”