This Glacier in the Antarctic Mountains Is Melting Faster Than Any Glacier Ever Observed Before
Off the Oscar II coast in the eastern Antarctic Peninsula, south way from the mountains, Hektoria Glacier is melting faster than an ice-cream on a hot summer day. Babbling within its concave geometry, the slush of ice is disappearing into the Antarctic mist. The dramatic story goes back to 2022, as an animation by CIRESVideos demonstrates. Ever since the glacier started unfreezing, its melodramatic melting display has piqued the curiosity of scientists, who believe that it could trigger a domino of melting in surrounding Antarctic glaciers, too, according to a recent study published in Nature Geoscience.
The story began in January 2021, as the CIRESVideos animation shows. Until this time, Hektoria was sitting like a giant icy tongue spread out on a thick, rugged bedrock, with the front lobe of the tongue stretching into the ocean. For several years in the past, the block of stationary sea ice blanketing the ocean’s tidewaters prevented Hektoria’s tongue from calving off. But in January 2022, a monstrous wave triggered the break-off of sea ice. By March 2022, the sea ice had weakened so much that it disintegrated, leading to the collapse of Hektoria’s sole buttress.
Without any apparent support, Hektoria’s tongue started crumbling and breaking. Like little ice biscuits or cookies spilling out on a production belt, the pieces of Hektoria’s ice started breaking off and spilling into the ocean. By April 2022, a major chunk of the tongue had floated away. Meanwhile, the portion sitting on top of the bedrock also started thinning, eventually detaching from the bedrock’s high point and the ice plain, due to buoyancy forces. Even till early 2023, Hektoria continued to break away. Chunks of ice kept on splitting and floating away in a domino dance above the ocean. At one point in 2023, the glacier stabilized on the bedrock’s high point.
Today, it continues to retreat, faster than any Antarctic glacier ever observed before. As the runaway surge of ice chunk production triggers the deceleration of the floating tongue, the glacier seems to react with a behavior that has left scientists with a “whodunnit mystery,” as the BBC described it.
Glacier in Antarctica (Representational Cover Image Source: Getty Images | anyaberkut)The study followed the project wherein scientists had been monitoring Antarctica’s Larsen Bay Area since 2021. The collapse of sea ice marked an episode that they declared as a melting “10 times faster than previously measured.” As more and more ice is breaking off and tumbling into the ocean, this new study offers a “tantalizing glimpse into what could be the fastest rate of retreat ever observed in modern-day Antarctica,” glaciologist Dr. Frazer Christie shared with BBC.
Lead researchers Dr. Naomi Ochwat of the University of Colorado, Boulder, and colleagues employed satellite imagery to investigate the “ice plain” adjoining Hektoria’s tongue. They found that the glacier lost almost half of its ice mass in just two months by late 2022. The glacier retreated by more than 5 miles. In contrast to most grounded glaciers that retreat about 1,000 feet per day, Hektoria appears to retreat as much as half a mile per day. To make matters worse, the dramatic calving has triggered a chain of severe earthquakes.
Above anything else, the culprit to blame is climate change. Climate scientist and vlogger Simon Clark has called October 2025 the “worst month of climate news.” And Hektoria’s retreating behavior seems to be the perfect epitome of his observation. Researchers involved in the study believe that Hektoria could be the first example of a process where the front of a glacier resting on the seabed is rapidly destabilizing, which could lead to much faster sea level rise in other places in Antarctica.
Lastly, the study provides an excellent addition to the growing catalog of climate studies in Antarctica, where scientists are scrutinizing sea level rise and melting ice shelves. While Hektoria’s retreat is a bit of a shock, scientists believe that it could open up frontiers of possibility regarding what mysterious forces influence the chemistry and geology of Antarctica’s bedrock.
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