A glacier in Antarctica retreated 16 miles in just 14 months—a pace that caught even seasoned ice researchers off guard. Hektoria, a relatively small grounded glacier, lost five miles of ice in November and December 2022 alone. For context, that's more than the length of Manhattan in two months.
Researchers stumbled on this discovery almost by accident. Naomi Ochwat and her team at the University of Colorado Boulder were analyzing sea ice data when they noticed Hektoria behaving strangely. "I realized that, OK, something special is going on here," Ochwat told CNN. The findings, published in Nature Geoscience, document what appears to be an unprecedented retreat rate for a grounded glacier in the modern record.
How a small glacier became a warning signal
Grounded glaciers—those anchored to the seafloor rather than floating freely—typically shrink by less than 1,000 feet per year. Hektoria's collapse happened in a cascade. In 2011, fast ice (frozen seawater attached to land) had stabilized the glacier, letting it extend into the bay. But in January 2022, storms broke up that protective ice layer, leaving Hektoria exposed. As the glacier thinned and became more buoyant, it lifted off the bedrock beneath it. Ocean water rushed into the gap, filling crevasses and triggering calving—the process where chunks of ice break off and drift away as icebergs.
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Start Your News DetoxTed Scambos, a study co-author at the University of Colorado Boulder, described the process to CNN as dominoes toppling: "their feet slipping out from under them, one after the other."
What makes this matter extends far beyond Hektoria itself. The glacier is relatively small, but Antarctica holds much larger grounded glaciers—some the size of Britain. If those ice masses go through the same unraveling process, the consequences for global sea levels could be severe. Thwaites Glacier, another Antarctic ice sheet, already accounts for about 4 percent of global sea level rise annually.
Scientists do debate whether Hektoria was truly as grounded as the study suggests—if more of it was floating ice rather than resting on bedrock, the retreat would be less unusual. But there's no disagreement on the broader picture. Anna Hogg, an ice researcher at the University of Leeds, put it plainly: "The changes in the polar regions are scarily rapid, quicker than we expected even a decade ago."
What happened at Hektoria isn't an anomaly born from nature alone. Global warming destabilized the ice that protected the glacier, setting off the chain reaction that followed. As the planet continues to warm, researchers are watching other grounded glaciers closely, wondering which might be next.
