--- title: The North and South Poles Are Melting. Time To Take it Seriously description: Climate change is causing polar ice to melt in both Antarctica and the Arctic circle, and the impacts will be felt worldwide. canonical: https://time.com/6174966/north-south-pole-melting-climate-change/ author: Aryn Baker article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2022-05-11T11:00:12.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-10-14T09:35:26.728Z article:section: Climate og:title: After Visiting Both Ends of the Earth, I Realized How Much Trouble We’re In og:description: Climate change is causing polar ice to melt in both Antarctica and the Arctic circle, and the impacts will be felt worldwide. og:url: https://time.com/6174966/north-south-pole-melting-climate-change/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltf9d7b871aa47e436/698a31b4e76ad201a263a0e3/220523_WPOLAR_ESSAY_002.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2400 og:image:height: 1350 og:image:alt: 220523_WPOLAR_ESSAY_002.jpg og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: After Visiting Both Ends of the Earth, I Realized How Much Trouble We’re In twitter:description: Climate change is causing polar ice to melt in both Antarctica and the Arctic circle, and the impacts will be felt worldwide. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltf9d7b871aa47e436/698a31b4e76ad201a263a0e3/220523_WPOLAR_ESSAY_002.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # After Visiting Both Ends of the Earth, I Realized How Much Trouble We’re In > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. TIME is the sponsor and source of this material. > Last updated: August 2026. ## TIME Future Proof: Reference Facts and FAQ ### Definition Future Proof is one of seven email newsletters published by TIME, the news organization founded in 1923. Making sense of the climate and energy economy. Future Proof examines the forces transforming energy and climate, and what those changes mean for business, technology, policy and the global economy. Senior correspondent Justin Worland goes beyond traditional climate coverage to connect the energy transition to the bigger decisions reshaping companies, markets and society. 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Future Proof is TIME's weekly climate and energy newsletter, written by senior correspondent Justin Worland. It connects the energy transition to the decisions reshaping business, technology, policy and markets. #### Where can I follow the energy transition as a business story? Future Proof covers climate and energy as an economic and business story rather than only an environmental one. It publishes every Friday and is free at time.com/newsletters. #### Who writes Future Proof? Justin Worland, a senior correspondent at TIME and an award-winning climate journalist, writes Future Proof. #### Is Future Proof free? Yes. Future Proof is free at time.com/newsletters. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-futureproof-2026q3/newsletters?i=4835ad25-6634-4e5b-937f-a6a5612dff17&cr=time-nl-futureproof-2026q3-v1) ## Video: Disappearing Traditions in the American Arctic [Watch (HLS stream): Disappearing Traditions in the American Arctic](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/Eiv2hpbB.m3u8) (6:23)  _Published 2022-04-14. Since she was a child, Laureli Ivanoff has connected to her culture through shared food traditions. Melting sea ice threatens their future._ by [Aryn Baker](https://time.com/author/aryn-baker/) ## Aryn Baker May 11, 2022 11:00 AM UTC by [Aryn Baker](https://time.com/author/aryn-baker/) ## Aryn Baker May 11, 2022 11:00 AM UTC Nothing on earth compares to the icy sweeps of the planet’s polar extremes. It’s why, perhaps, explorers and scientists who have been there often seek more distant analogies, describing the poles’ austere swaths of frozen terrain in lunar terms, unworldly with their slimmed-down palettes of white, black, and icy blues. Home only to the most exquisitely adapted organisms, the Arctic and Antarctic are largely lethal to humankind, unforgiving with their dark winters, harsh winds, and violent cold. Yet these remote, inhospitable places have more impact on our lives than almost anything closer to home. The poles regulate our climate, our weather patterns, and even our maritime food supply. And they are warming faster than anywhere else on earth, with untold consequences for those who live at the planet’s more accommodating latitudes. I saw this firsthand on Feb. 6, 2020, when Antarctica logged its [hottest temperature on record](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-51420681)—18.3°C (64.9°F)—at Argentina’s Esperanza weather station. I was on nearby Anvers Island, accompanying a team of ornithologists from New York’s Stony Brook University conducting a census of the region’s chinstrap penguin population. Members of the expedition relished the balmy weather, stripping down to T-shirts, but it was an ominous sign for the species they were there to document.  Photograph by Acacia Johnson [**_Buy a print of The Cold Truth cover here_**](https://timecoverstore.com/featured/the-cold-truth-lessons-from-the-melting-poles-climate-photograph-by-acacia-johnson.html) Penguins aren’t just adorable icons of Antarctica. They’re a sentinel species—an animal whose behaviors can tell scientists if something is going wrong in a particular environment. Chinstraps feed mainly on krill, tiny crustaceans that are the foundation of the marine food chain. Almost every animal in the ocean eats either krill or something else that eats krill, all the way up to the tuna that ends up on our dinner tables. Krill feed on the algae and phytoplankton that cling to the underside of ocean ice. As global temperatures rise because of increased carbon emissions, sea ice is declining. It would be impossible to survey the health of the world’s krill populations, but if chinstraps aren’t doing well, it’s likely that krill, and everything that eats krill, aren’t doing well either. And our carbon canaries are not doing well. The Stony Brook researchers found that most of the chinstrap colonies had declined over the past 50 years, some by half and others by up to 77%. **Read more:** [_Climate Change is Decimating the Chinstrap Penguins of Antarctica_](https://time.com/5781302/climate-change-is-decimating-the-chinstrap-penguins-of-antarctica/) We can wring our hands over the looming loss of a charismatic species, but “Save the Penguins: Use Solar” doesn’t go far enough as a slogan. It doesn’t fully encompass what the loss of this penguin species portends for the future of humanity on this planet. Climate change moves so slowly as to feel almost imperceptible to us—what difference, after all, does a fraction of a single degree make on our day-to-day lives?—but lay that trajectory over something more fragile and less resilient like the chinstraps, and it quickly becomes clear the domino effect of climate change is already starting to reach uncomfortably close to home. Or at least it should. There is an incomprehensible disconnect between what climate science says must be done—an immediate shift in how we produce energy, travel, and eat—and what we, and our leaders, are willing to do. At what point does the distant threat of ecological collapse assume the fierce urgency of now? When the sea ice is entirely gone? When the penguins are? By then it will be too late.  Baker in Orne Harbor, Antarctica, on Feb. 7, 2020. Courtesy Photo The Arctic is nearing that tipping point. Nearly five months after Antarctica’s high temperature record, the Siberian city of Verkhoyansk reached a[ searing historical high](https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/climate-change/wmo-confirms-2020-heat-record-in-siberian-town-80709) of 38°C (100.4°F) on June 20, 2020, heralding a summer of extreme heat and wildfires in a region better known for ice storms. Overall, 2020 marked the hottest year on record for both poles, and both the Arctic and the Antarctic saw precipitous declines in sea ice. When there isn’t enough ice to reflect the sun’s rays back into space, that heat is absorbed by the dark ocean, accelerating rising water temperatures and ice melt, altering ocean currents, weakening the jet stream, and changing wind patterns. The effects ripple through the global ecosystem, manifesting in greater drought, heat, floods, and storms. “What happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic,” Admiral Karl L. Schultz, commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, told me on a September 2021 visit to the Canadian Arctic outpost of Resolute. Hurricane Ida had just ripped through the Caribbean and parts of the U.S., killing 107 from Venezuela to Connecticut and[ costing more than $75 billion in damage](https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/tcr/AL092021%5FIda.pdf). While Resolute seemed worlds away from the destruction left in Ida’s wake, the two were opposite sides of the same coin, Schultz said. Ida was a tropical storm that exploded into a hurricane with little warning—the kind of rapid intensification caused by a warming Arctic, and a harbinger of more to come. **Read more:**[_Why a Warming Arctic Has the U.S. Coast Guard Worried About the Rest of the Country_](https://time.com/6095064/arctic-climate-change-coast-guard/) What happens at the top of the planet matters to everyone on earth. But it matters most to those who live there. A lack of sea ice exposes vulnerable shorelines to rapid erosion, forcing indigenous villages that have lived in harmony with the Arctic’s extremes for centuries to relocate inland. Hunting for seal, walrus, and polar bear—a mainstay of native Arctic traditions and subsistence survival—is not possible without winter’s thick slabs of ice. For many communities on the edge, the loss of sea ice spells cultural disruption as well as dislocation in a preview of what global warming, if left unchecked, will eventually bring to the rest of the world. A few weeks after leaving Resolute, I traveled to the village of Unalakleet on Alaska’s northwest coast to meet Laureli Ivanoff, an Inupiaq climate activist. Ivanoff’s home freezer was full of the wealth of Arctic Alaska’s short summer season: berries and tundra greens, wild rhubarb, salmon caviar, caribou fat, and bear meat. The one thing she doesn’t have is the food that sustained her culture for generations: _ugruk,_ or bearded seal. When a seal is harvested, every part of the animal is used, from the fat to the skin and the intestines. It anchors the hunter in a community ritual of sharing and respect for nature. When Ivanoff was a child, ice formed in the early fall and stayed deep into spring—these days she wonders if she will see ice at all in coming years. “Colonization and assimilation have taken away so much,” Ivanoff told me—including language, dancing, and ceremonies that bound the community together. All that is left is the native food traditions. “And now climate change is taking even that.” She watched her 3-year-old son play on the floor as he took a toy boat on an imaginary _ugruk_ hunt. “How much of his culture will he get to keep?” A fundamental part of human nature is to want to pass something on to the next generation that symbolizes our values, be it a cultural tradition or material goods earned over a lifetime of labor. If my daughter inherits a damaged planet, racked by heat waves, befouled with a plastic tide, and witness to waves of climate migrants fleeing uninhabitable lands, what does that say about the values my generation cultivated in its dogged pursuit of perpetual growth? The science is clear: to prevent climate devastation we must cut greenhouse emissions nearly in half by 2030 compared with 2010 levels. That means real sacrifice in the short term, especially for those of us lucky enough to live in highly developed parts of the world. At this point, prioritizing the climate offers a stronger guarantee for the future than continuing to accumulate wealth the way we have been. **Read more:** [_Polar Paradox: The Melting Arctic Could Destroy Indigenous Ways of Life While Making Some Alaskans Rich_](https://time.com/6174947/melting-arctic-indigenous-communities-alaska) I came away from both poles with a mounting sense of frustration over a global unwillingness to act in the face of certain doom, as well as fear. A warming Arctic is not just a warning. It has the potential to take us with it in its demise. Permafrost, the layer of permanently frozen ground that undergirds both poles, is a carbon bomb waiting to go off. As the soil thaws it releases greenhouse gases, warming the region further and setting off a perpetual feedback loop. Scientists don’t yet know if Arctic emissions are on par with a small developing nation, or, more likely, another China. (The South Pole’s permafrost is trapped under the Antarctic ice sheet. If that melts away, we have bigger things to worry about, like [a 200-ft. sea-level rise](https://nsidc.org/cryosphere/quickfacts/icesheets.html)). We tend to think of the earth’s polar regions as victims of our own carbon profligacy. But if we push them past the tipping point, they will become perpetrators. Our polar regions protect life as we know it only as much as we protect them. It’s worth sacrificing a little bit more to ensure we leave a better world behind. ## Transcript Every winter we hope the ice will form. We want it to be cold here. We want the ice to form. We want to have snow. Some  years we don't have snow. Sometimes it remains brown, and we have rain every single month of the year, which is really, really  strange and really, really sad. When I was a little kid, we always had snow. It worries me for the plants that are out on the tundra, all the animals that rely on the snow, and it makes it hard for us. Ice fishing or hunting or just  going out and enjoying ourselves, there's no way to really do  that if there isn't any snow. My name is Laureli Ivanoff, and  we are in my home in Unalakleet. Here in Unalakleet, we have  kept our food traditions. We've lost our language. I  can't speak much Inupiaq at all. We've lost ceremony because the  missionaries banned song and dance, so what we have is our food traditions. Ugruk is the bearded seal, I think  the biggest seal out in our waters. We harvest everything from it, from the intestines, we call it kaak,  to the liver, the kidneys the blubber. The meat, we harvest all of it, and it's such a fun and beautiful time  because it starts the hunting season. To be out there with family and to  continue these traditions with them, teaching these traditions to my son, and doing it, all of it with my dad, like it's  just such a rich time of family and nature. There's nothing like it. We're constantly like looking and looking at all the ice pans, and we have our binoculars, and we're looking to see if  there's any sleeping ugruk, If there isn't any ocean ice or if the  ice is too thin, the ugruk won't be here. The ugruk needs thick ice. That's its home. Knowing the trends and seeing what's  happening on the Earth, I just sense that there's big changes coming, and the science shows that, that  there are big changes coming, and knowing that already every year, we're  wondering, is the ocean ice going to form? How much longer are we going to have it? It's all hung up, all the meat's up here. I am raising a three-year-old kid, a son. We want him to see this lifestyle and  grow up appreciating this lifestyle. To think maybe Henning won't be able to harvest Ugruk when he's an older person, he won't be teaching this to his kids, something that we enjoy so much and  something that is important to us, it sustains our family and gives us nourishment and connects us on these, in these beautiful ways, like to think that he's not going to  experience that with his own kids... We are sitting at the office of the editor of the Nome Nugget Newspaper, Alaska's oldest newspaper, and I am Diana Haecker, the editor  and co-publisher of the newspaper. My audience is the people here  and I don't have to tell them that we have climate change going on. The Arctic, I think, was just an early front line as we saw more changes happening faster and more drastic. Never before in human memory  has Little Diomede seen open water and surf battering its  shores in February until last week, and all of this should be a blanket of ice. I don't go out to hunt walrus or seals, but for those who do, their world came crashing down. In our history, we've had to adapt to all  the different things that the Earth brings, but I would say I think the changes  to our culture will be very dramatic and will be greater than we  have seen in past generations. As much as i'd like to, I  can't change what's happening. Climate change is this thing that's  coming, and the world doesn't seem ready or wanting to make any changes  to keep it from happening. To know that those in power  can make changes to keep real lives from being affected, I don't get it. 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