On a strip of coast in East Antarctica, between Queen Mary Land and Wilkes Land, more snow than usual falls for almost two years. In orbit the GRACE-FO satellites measure Earth’s gravity. When ice builds up, the gravity above it rises slightly. Between July 2021 and April 2023 the satellites see the whole Antarctic ice sheet grow by about 695 billion tonnes.
The study was published open access in Nature on 19 August 2026. It has seven authors. The first is Yunhe Wang, the last is Eric J. Steig of the University of Washington in Seattle. The Chinese Academy of Sciences press release was picked up by ScienceDaily on 6 September.
The gain has to be read against the long record. From 2003 to 2024 the Antarctic ice sheet lost an average of 140.5 billion tonnes a year, give or take 2. Most of the loss comes from West Antarctica, where the ocean melts glaciers from below. West Antarctica kept losing ice during the gain as well. The authors write that between 2021 and 2024 the continent’s net balance stayed close to zero.

The 695 billion tonne gain is the largest over 22 months since these measurements began, about twenty years ago. Roughly two thirds, 470 billion tonnes, lies in the sector between Queen Mary Land and Wilkes Land. There cumulative precipitation rose 351 billion tonnes above normal, according to the ERA5 reanalysis. A reanalysis rebuilds past weather by combining a model with observations. Two regional climate models give almost the same figure. The Law Dome ice core in East Antarctica follows the same change in snowfall over the years they share.
The cause lies far away. Between the western Pacific and the eastern Indian Ocean sits the tropical warm pool, one of the warmest stretches of ocean on the planet. From 2021 to 2023 its surface warmed for several years running. The heat set off a Rossby wave train, large undulations in the atmospheric circulation that travel towards the poles. A high-pressure system settled over East Antarctica. The air flow pushed moisture towards the coast, drawn mostly from the mid-latitude Indian Ocean. The authors traced the path with experiments on two atmospheric models and with a model that tags water vapour by its ocean of origin.

Global warming plays a small part in this episode. The authors used a large ensemble of simulations from the CESM1 model. The ensemble mean isolates the forced part, the climate’s response to external factors such as greenhouse gases. In that sector the forced part of precipitation rises by 32 billion tonnes. That is about 9 per cent of the observed anomaly. The rest comes from natural climate variability. A similar multiyear warming of the warm pool recurs about once a decade, in observations and in historical simulations.
The press release opens by saying that East Antarctica gained 695 billion tonnes. In the paper that figure belongs to the whole ice sheet. The eastern sector studied accounts for 470. The release then assigns the 9 per cent to human-caused warming. The paper measures the response to all the forcings in the model, which are mostly human but not only.
A few newsroom calculations help to weigh the figures. About 362 billion tonnes of ice raise the sea by one millimetre. The gain is worth just under 2 millimetres of sea level held back on land. At the average 2003–2024 rate, the ice sheet would have lost about 258 billion tonnes in 22 months.

The limitations are set out in the paper. What starts and sustains the multiyear warming of the warm pool remains unclear. The authors cannot rule out that other known modes of Southern Hemisphere variability reinforced the high pressure. How this link will change in a warmer climate is uncertain. For the authors the slowdown may be a temporary pause. The loss is still driven by melting from below and by glacier dynamics, and the length of the pause depends on both.
The snow fell on East Antarctica. The ocean kept working beneath West Antarctica.

Antarctica, July 2021–April 2023: mass gain of the whole ice sheet measured by the GRACE-FO satellites, share of the sector between Queen Mary Land and Wilkes Land, extra precipitation in the same sector according to the ERA5 reanalysis and the forced part in CESM1 simulations, in billion tonnes; in orange the average loss expected over 22 months at the 2003–2024 rate (140.5 Gt a year), calculated by the newsroom. Chart produced by ScienceOnline from data in Wang Y. et al., Nature 2026, doi 10.1038/s41586-026-10912-x (open access article). Original newsroom chart.

References
Wang Y., Ding Q., Li X., Ballinger T.J., Nakayama Y., Topál D., Steig E.J., «Multiyear tropical warm pool warming drives slowdown in Antarctic mass loss», Nature, 656, 8129, 897–904, published 19 August 2026, open access (licence not verified in session). doi: 10.1038/s41586-026-10912-x
Chinese Academy of Sciences, press release, republished by ScienceDaily on 6 September 2026 as «Antarctica gained a record 695 billion tons of ice. Scientists found the surprising reason».