Abstract
Climate models show that Antarctic surface melt will increase through the current century. Surface melting changes ice sheet albedo, the availability of liquid water for endemic and invasive species, and may even accelerate ice shelf collapse and global sea level rise. Here we show, using 1 km downscaled projections of potential Antarctic surface melt, that the total area experiencing surface melt will expand by more than 10% by 2100 under a Shared Socio-economic Pathway 3-7.0 scenario, with increased potential melt totals likely to threaten the viability of ice shelves mostly in the West Antarctic Peninsula and Amundsen Sea Embayment, through an elevated risk of hydrofracture. By calculating the latitudinal rate of melt migration we also find that Shared Socio-economic Pathway 1-2.6 is the only emissions scenario under which the rate of future Antarctic surface melt expansion will stabilize at present levels.
Similar content being viewed by others
Data availability
REMA surface elevation data are available at https://www.pgc.umn.edu/data/rema/. ERA5 reanalysis data are available at https://doi.org/10.24381/cds.adbb2d47. BedMachine Antarctica V3 data are available at https://doi.org/10.5067/FPSU0V1MWUB6. Satellite SSM/I and SMMR, AMSR-E surface melt day data are available at https://doi.org/10.18709/perscido.2022.09.ds376. RACMO2.3p2 surface melt rate data are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7845736. CMIP6 data are available at https://esgf-data.dkrz.de/search/cmip6-dkrz. CMIP6 and CORDEX-CMIP5 MMM temperature anomalies are available at https://interactive-atlas.ipcc.ch/. Information on these data can be found at https://wcrp-cmip.org/cmip-data-access/and https://cordex.org/data-access/. Ice surface elevation anomaly data are available at https://osf.io/aupnk/and https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/3EDXF, or from https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-0889-9. The Zwally Antarctic drainage basin data are available at http://imbie.org/imbie-3/drainage-basins/and https://earth.gsfc.nasa.gov/cryo/data/polar-altimetry/antarctic-and-greenland-drainage-systems. Spatial maps of passive ice areas, vulnerable to hydrofracturing, and present-day fracture locations are available at https://doi.org/10.15784/601335. Data generated and analysed in this research are available at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/CDKVT.
Code availability
Codes used in this research are available at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/CDKVT.
References
Trusel, L. D. et al. Divergent trajectories of Antarctic surface melt under two twenty-first-century climate scenarios. Nat. Geosci. 8, 927 (2015).
Banwell, A. Ice-shelf stability questioned. Nature 544, 306 (2017).
Hock, R. Glacier melt: a review of processes and their modelling. Prog. Phys. Geogr. 29, 362 (2005).
Bell, R. E., Banwell, A. F., Trusel, L. D. & Kingslake, J. Antarctic surface hydrology and impacts on ice-sheet mass balance. Nat. Clim. Change 8, 1044 (2018).
Zheng, Y., Golledge, N. R., Gossart, A., Picard, G. & Leduc-Leballeur, M. Statistically parameterizing and evaluating a positive degree-day model to estimate surface melt in antarctica from 1979 to 2022. Cryosphere 17, 3667 (2023).
Hofsteenge, M.G. et al. On the non-linear response of Antarctic ice shelf surface melt to warming. EGUsphere 1–26, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-4176 (2025).
Mottram, R. et al. The greenlandification of Antarctica. Nat. Geosci. 18, 928–930 (2025)
Almela, P., Elser, J. J., Giersch, J. J., Hotaling, S. & Hamilton, T. L. Influence of snow cover on albedo reduction by snow algae. mBio 16, 03630 (2025).
Golledge, N. R. et al. Global environmental consequences of twenty-first-century ice-sheet melt. Nature 566, 65 (2019).
DeConto, R. M. & Pollard, D. Contribution of Antarctica to past and future sea-level rise. Nature 531, 591 (2016).
Jourdain, N. C., Amory, C., Kittel, C. & Durand, G. Changes in Antarctic surface conditions and potential for ice shelf hydrofracturing from 1850 to 2200. Cryosphere 19, 1641 (2025).
Golledge, N. R. et al. The multi-millennial Antarctic commitment to future sea-level rise. Nature 526, 421 (2015).
Burgard, C. et al. Ocean warming threatens the viability of 60% of Antarctic ice shelves. Nature 647, 102–108 (2025).
Lee, J. R. et al. Climate change drives expansion of Antarctic ice-free habitat. Nature 547, 49 (2017).
Broeke, M. R. et al. Contrasting current and future surface melt rates on the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica: Lessons from in situ observations and climate models. PLOS Clim. 2, 0000203 (2023).
Roda Husman, S. et al. A high-resolution record of surface melt on Antarctic ice shelves using multi-source remote sensing data and deep learning. Remote Sens. Environ. 301, 113950 (2024).
Gossart, A. et al. An evaluation of surface climatology in state-of-the-art reanalyses over the Antarctic ice sheet. J. Clim. 32, 6899 (2019).
Banwell, A. F., Wever, N., Dunmire, D. & Picard, G. Quantifying Antarctic-wide ice-shelf surface melt volume using microwave and firn model data: 1980 to 2021. Geophys. Res. Lett. 50, 2023 (2023).
Tuckett, P. A. et al. Continent-wide mapping shows increasing sensitivity of East Antarctica to meltwater ponding. Nat. Clim. Change 15, 775 (2025).
Zheng, L. et al. Rapid increases in satellite-observed ice sheet surface meltwater production. Nat. Clim. Change 15, 769 (2025).
Pathak, M. et al. Technical summary. In Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group III to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (eds Shukla, P.R.) (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
Lee, H. et al. Synthesis report. In Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report (eds Lee, H., Romero, J.) (Cambridge University Press, 2023).
Lai, C.-Y. et al. Vulnerability of Antarctica’s ice shelves to meltwater-driven fracture. Nature 584, 574 (2020).
Donat-Magnin, M. et al. Future surface mass balance and surface melt in the Amundsen sector of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Cryosphere 15, 571 (2021).
Kittel, C. et al. Diverging future surface mass balance between the Antarctic ice shelves and grounded ice sheet. Cryosphere 15, 1215 (2021).
Mottram, R. et al. What is the surface mass balance of Antarctica? An intercomparison of regional climate model estimates. Cryosphere 15, 3751 (2021).
Noël, B. et al. Higher Antarctic ice sheet accumulation and surface melt rates revealed at 2 km resolution. Nat. Commun. 14, 7949 (2023).
Niu, L.et al. Detection of Antarctic surface meltwater using Sentinel-2 remote sensing images via U-net with attention blocks: a case study over the Amery ice shelf. In IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing (IEEE, 2023).
Bochow, N., Hess, P. & Robinson, A. Physics-constrained generative machine learning-based high-resolution downscaling of Greenland’s surface mass balance and surface temperature. EGUsphere, 2025, 1 (2025).
Carter, J., Leeson, A., Orr, A., Kittel, C. & van Wessem, J. M. Variability in Antarctic surface climatology across regional climate models and reanalysis datasets. Cryosphere 16, 3815 (2022).
Hansen, N. et al. Downscaled surface mass balance in Antarctica: impacts of subsurface processes and large-scale atmospheric circulation. Cryosphere 15, 4315 (2021).
Kittel, C. et al. Clouds drive differences in future surface melt over the Antarctic ice shelves. Cryosphere 16, 2655 (2022).
Hock, R. Temperature index melt modelling in mountain areas. J. Hydrol. 282, 104 (2003).
Goel, V. et al. Characteristics of ice rises and ice rumples in Dronning Maud Land and Enderby Land, Antarctica. J. Glaciol. 66, 1064 (2020).
Kingslake, J., Ely, J. C., Das, I. & Bell, R. E. Widespread movement of meltwater onto and across Antarctic ice shelves. Nature 544, 349 (2017).
Arias, P.A. et al. Technical summary. In Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (eds, Masson-Delmotte, V. et al.) (Cambridge University Press, 2021). https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009157896.002.
Coulon, V. et al. Disentangling the drivers of future Antarctic ice loss with a historically calibrated ice-sheet model. Cryosphere 18, 653 (2024).
Hausfather, Z. & Peters, G. P. Emissions–the -‘business as usual’story is misleading. Nature 577, 618 (2020).
Shiogama, H. et al. Important distinctiveness of ssp3–7.0 for use in impact assessments. Nat. Clim. Change 13, 1276 (2023).
Fürst, J. J. et al. The safety band of Antarctic ice shelves. Nat. Clim. Change 6, 479 (2016).
Lowry, D. P., Krapp, M., Golledge, N. R. & Alevropoulos-Borrill, A. The influence of emissions scenarios on future Antarctic ice loss is unlikely to emerge this century. Commun. Earth Environ. 2, 221 (2021).
Loarie, S. R. et al. The velocity of climate change. Nature 462, 1052 (2009).
Chan, W.-P. et al. Climate velocities and species tracking in global mountain regions. Nature 629, 114–120 (2024).
Abram, N. J. et al. Acceleration of snow melt in an Antarctic Peninsula ice core during the twentieth century. Nat. Geosci. 6, 404 (2013).
IPCC summary for policymakers. In Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (eds Masson-Delmotte, V. et al.) (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
Lee, J. R. et al. Islands in the ice: Potential impacts of habitat transformation on Antarctic biodiversity. Glob. Change Biol. 28, 5865 (2022).
Rintoul, S. R. et al. Choosing the future of Antarctica. Nature 558, 233 (2018).
Convey, P. & Peck, L. S. Antarctic environmental change and biological responses. Sci. Adv. 5, 0888 (2019).
Pritchard, H. D. et al. Antarctic ice-sheet loss driven by basal melting of ice shelves. Nature 484, 502 (2012).
DeConto, R. M. et al. The Paris Climate Agreement and future sea-level rise from Antarctica. Nature 593, 83 (2021).
Paolo, F. S. et al. Widespread slowdown in thinning rates of West Antarctic ice shelves. Cryosphere 17, 3409 (2023).
Seroussi, H. et al. Insights on the vulnerability of Antarctic glaciers from the ISMIP6 ice sheet model ensemble and associated uncertainty. Cryosphere 17, 5197 (2023).
Machguth, H. et al. Greenland meltwater storage in firn limited by near-surface ice formation. Nat. Clim. Change 6, 390 (2016).
Noël, B. et al. A tipping point in refreezing accelerates mass loss of Greenland’s glaciers and ice caps. Nat. Commun. 8, 14730 (2017).
MacFerrin, M. et al. Rapid expansion of Greenland’s low-permeability ice slabs. Nature 573, 403 (2019).
Cooper, M. G. et al. Greenland ice sheet runoff reduced by meltwater refreezing in bare ice. Nat. Commun. 16, 8273 (2025).
The Firn Symposium team Firn on ice sheets. Nat. Rev. Earth Environ. 5, 79 (2024).
Bell, R. E. et al. Antarctic ice shelf potentially stabilized by export of meltwater in surface river. Nature 544, 344 (2017).
Spergel, J. J., Kingslake, J., Creyts, T., Wessem, M. & Fricker, H. A. Surface meltwater drainage and ponding on Amery ice shelf, East Antarctica, 1973–2019. J. Glaciol. 67, 985 (2021).
Lenaerts, J. et al. Meltwater produced by wind–albedo interaction stored in an east Antarctic ice shelf. Nat. Clim. Change 7, 58 (2017).
Dell, R. L., Willis, I. C., Arnold, N. S., Banwell, A. F. & Roda Husman, S. Substantial contribution of slush to meltwater area across Antarctic ice shelves. Nat. Geosci. 17, 624 (2024).
Wager, A. Flooding of the ice shelf in George VI Sound. Br. Antarct. Surv. Bull. 28, 71 (1972).
Dunmire, D., Wever, N., Banwell, A. F. & Lenaerts, J. T. Antarctic-wide ice-shelf firn emulation reveals robust future firn air depletion signal for the Antarctic Peninsula. Commun. Earth Environ. 5, 100 (2024).
Veldhuijsen, S., Van De Berg, W. J., Kuipers Munneke, P. & Van Den Broeke, M. R. Firn air content changes on Antarctic ice shelves under three future warming scenarios. Cryosphere 18, 1983 (2024).
Tedstone, A. J. & Machguth, H. Increasing surface runoff from Greenland’s firn areas. Nat. Clim. Change 12, 672 (2022).
Fretwell, P. et al. Bedmap2: improved ice bed, surface and thickness datasets for Antarctica. Cryosphere 7, 375 (2013).
Howat, I. M., Porter, C., Smith, B. E., Noh, M.-J. & Morin, P. The reference elevation model of Antarctica. Cryosphere 13, 665 (2019).
Kampenhout, L. et al. Present-day Greenland ice sheet climate and surface mass balance in CESM2. J. Geophys. Res. 125, 2019 (2020).
Lin, Y. et al. Community integrated earth system model (ciesm): description and evaluation. J. Adv. Model. Earth Syst. 12, 2019 (2020).
Cherchi, A. et al. Global mean climate and main patterns of variability in the CMCC-CM2 coupled model. J. Adv. Model. Earth Syst. 11, 185 (2019).
Lovato, T. et al. CMIP6 simulations with the CMCC Earth System Model (CMCC-ESM2). J. Adv. Model. Earth Syst. 14, 2021 (2022).
Lawrence, D. M. et al. The community land model version 5: description of new features, benchmarking, and impact of forcing uncertainty. J. Adv. Model. Earth Syst. 11, 4245 (2019).
Davies, B. J. et al. Modelled glacier response to centennial temperature and precipitation trends on the Antarctic Peninsula. Nat. Clim. Change 4, 993 (2014).
Pollard, D. & DeConto, R. Description of a hybrid ice sheet-shelf model, and application to Antarctica. Geosci. Model Dev. 5, 1273 (2012).
Pollard, D., DeConto, R. M. & Alley, R. B. Potential Antarctic Ice Sheet retreat driven by hydrofracturing and ice cliff failure. Earth Planet. Sci. Lett. 412, 112 (2015).
Howat, I. et al. The Reference Elevation Model of Antarctica - Mosaics, Version 2. Harvard Dataverse, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/EBW8UC (2022).
Morlighem, M. et al. Deep glacial troughs and stabilizing ridges unveiled beneath the margins of the Antarctic ice sheet. Nat. Geosci. 13, 132 (2020).
Morlighem, M. MEaSUREs BedMachine Antarctica, Version 3. NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center. https://doi.org/10.5067/FPSU0V1MWUB6 (2022).
Masson-Delmotte, V. et al. Climate change 2021: the physical science basis. Contribution of working group I to the sixth assessment report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change. Vol. 2, 2391 (2021).
Picard, G. & Fily, M. Surface melting observations in Antarctica by microwave radiometers: Correcting 26-year time series from changes in acquisition hours. Remote Sens. Environ. 104, 325 (2006).
Picard, G., Fily, M. & Gallée, H. Surface melting derived from microwave radiometers: a climatic indicator in Antarctica. Ann. Glaciol. 46, 29 (2007).
Trusel, L. D. et al. Nonlinear rise in Greenland runoff in response to post-industrial Arctic warming. Nature 564, 104 (2018).
Trusel, L., Frey, K. E. & Das, S. B. Antarctic surface melting dynamics: enhanced perspectives from radar scatterometer data. J. Geophys. Res. 117, F02023 (2012).
Schwalm, C. R., Glendon, S. & Duffy, P. B. Rcp8. 5 tracks cumulative CO2 emissions. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 117, 19656 (2020).
Mouginot, J., Scheuchl, B., Rignot, E. :MEaSUREs Annual Antarctic Ice Velocity Maps, Version 1. NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center, https://doi.org/10.5067/9T4EPQXTJYW9 (2017).
Mouginot, J., Rignot, E. & Scheuchl, B. Continent-wide, interferometric SAR phase, mapping of Antarctic ice velocity. Geophys. Res. Lett. 46, 9710 (2019).
Acknowledgements
This work was funded by contract RDF-VUW1501 to N.R.G. from the Royal Society Te Apārangi, with support from the Antarctic Research Centre, Victoria University of Wellington (VUW). Y.Z. and S.S. are supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China, (Grant No. 2024YFF0809404). N.R.G. and A.G. are supported by grant ANTA1801 ("New Zealand Antarctic Science Platform”) from the New Zealand Ministry of Business, Innovation, & Employment. N.R.G. is supported by grant RTVU2206 ("Our Changing Coast”) from the New Zealand Ministry of Business, Innovation, & Employment. We gratefully acknowledge technical assistance and access to compute resources provided through the Centre for Academic Development and the Rāpoi compute cluster at VUW. We are also grateful to the CMIP community for making their simulations freely available.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
Y.Z., N.R.G., and A.G. conceived the study. Y.Z. performed the simulations and analysis. Y.Z., N.R.G., and A.G. contributed to writing the paper. Y.Z., N.R.G., and A.G. contributed to revisions and editing. S.S. assisted Y.Z. whilst undertaking some of this work.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Peer review
Peer review information
Nature Communications thanks the anonymous reviewers for their contribution to the peer review of this work. A peer review file is available.
Additional information
Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Supplementary information
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
About this article
Cite this article
Zheng, Y., Golledge, N.R., Gossart, A. et al. Expansion of Antarctic surface melt through the 21st century. Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-71114-7
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-71114-7
