Seen from space, Antarctica looks so much simpler than the other continents — a great sheet of ice set in contrast to the dark waters of the encircling Southern Ocean. Get closer, though, and you’ll find not a simple cap of frozen water, but an extraordinarily complex interplay between the ocean, sea ice, and ice sheets and shelves.

That relationship is in serious peril. A new paper in the journal Nature catalogs how several “abrupt changes,” like the precipitous loss of sea ice over the last decade, are unfolding in Antarctica and its surrounding waters, reinforcing one another and threatening to send the continent past the point of no return — and flood coastal cities everywhere as the sea rises several feet.

“We’re seeing a whole range of abrupt and surprising changes developing acr

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