As climate change redraws the Antarctic coastline, it may also be unveiling something far more contentious than bare rock: mineral wealth long locked beneath ice.
A new study published in Nature Climate Change projects that up to 120,000 square kilometres of new ice-free land an increase of roughly 550 per cent could emerge across Antarctica over the next three centuries under warming scenarios. The research, led by Erica M. Lucas and colleagues, combines advanced sea-level modelling with ice-sheet melt projections to map how retreating ice and shifting shorelines will reshape the continent.
The findings suggest that newly exposed terrain will appear in all regions with existing territorial claims, as well as in the currently unclaimed sector of West Antarctica. And where rock emerges, geology follows. Based on the continent’s known geological structure and mapped mineral occurrences, the authors argue that this land exposure is likely to reveal new deposits of metals and other mineral resources.
Antarctica is currently protected from mining by the 1991 Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty, which prohibits mineral resource activities other than scientific research. But the study notes that as ice-free land expands and global demand for critical minerals intensifies, economic and political pressure to reconsider Antarctic resources could grow in the coming centuries.
The projections rely on state-of-the-art modelling of glacial isostatic adjustment and sea-level change, accounting for how Earth’s crust rebounds as ice mass diminishes. The result is not only retreating ice sheets but also shifting coastlines and exposure of bedrock in areas previously inaccessible beneath thick ice cover.
The implications are as much geopolitical as geological. New land exposure across claimed and unclaimed sectors could revive dormant territorial sensitivities in a region long governed by cooperative scientific norms. At the same time, mineral extraction in one of the planet’s most fragile ecosystems would raise profound environmental questions.
The authors stop short of advocating development, instead framing their work as a warning: as climate change accelerates, Antarctica’s physical transformation may outpace its legal and governance frameworks. In a warming world, they suggest, the debate may no longer be about whether resources exist beneath the ice—but whether the global community can resist the temptation to exploit them.