Scientists first started routinely tracking the sea ice that surrounds Antarctica in 1979, and of all the years since, nAccording to NASA, 2014 set a new maximum for sea ice around the southern continent: the ice extent peaked at 7.78 million square miles in mid-September.
one had a higher sea ice extent than this one.
In the last 30-odd years, though, the world has been slowly warming due to global climate change—which is not usually associated with an increase in ice. So what's going on?
Well, honestly, no one really knows. “It's really not surprising to people in the climate field that not every location on the face of Earth is acting as expected – it would be amazing if everything did,” said one scientist with NASA.