Talking about the melting of all the ice in Antarctica means talking about a lot of hypotheticals, because until it happens, there’s really no way to account for all the interconnected systems that are all working together to keep this big blue marble of ours floating through time and space. That means it’s tough to come up with exact numbers, but researchers do know that when Antarctica’s ice melts, it’s going to change the length of a day.

Jerry Mitrovica is a Harvard University professor, and he explained the whole thing to Reuters. When ice melts, that’s going to shift water — and weight. He says to imagine a figure skater spinning on the ice. When they lift and lower their arms, they shift their weight and spin either faster or slower. And that’s what is going to happen to the planet. Mitrovica says it’s already starting to happen, and thanks to the melting ice and the polar shift, a day has already gotten imperceptibly longer by about a thousandth of a second.

It’s not clear just how much longer the day will get if all the ice was to melt, but UC Irvine glaciologist Mathieu Morlighem estimates (via Inverse) that it could change by as much as 20 seconds.

Antarctica might look cold and desolate, but it’s actually only one of those things. It’s home to a wide range of animal life, from sea birds and penguins to seals, whales, and other marine creatures. Most of them? It’s not a pretty picture.

According to the Columbia Climate School, climate change will be devastating to most of the species who live there. Penguins — including Emperor and Adélie penguins — have already (as of 2015) seen a massive decrease in numbers as the ice has started to disappear. Other species — like the Chinstrap penguin — have taken their place, but the complete disappearance of ice would be devastating to pretty much everyone. The same situation goes for animals like seals and whales. Many species are considered ice-dependent, and that simply means that when the ice goes, they will, too. It’ll be the end of Leopard and Ross seals, along with Minke whales.

There’s a second part of this, too. Creatures like krill and phytoplankton are on the bottom of the food chain, and not only do scores of creatures rely on them, but they rely on the sea ice. Taking out the bottom rung of the food chain won’t be just devastating, it would be likely to set off a chain reaction felt throughout the ecosystem.

If Antarctica’s ice melts, it’s not just going to dump a ton of water onto the planet — it’s going to free everything that’s been hiding underneath that ice for millions of years. In 2011, Chilean research teams were looking at just what kind of microbes were living in the Antarctic ice, and they found some surprising — and potentially terrifying — things. Their study (published in Nature) found that the microbes were well adapted to surviving life in extreme cold. No shock there, but they were also capable of surviving in environments that had super-high concentrations of salt, were super acidic, super alkaline, and included temperatures up to around 200 Fahrenheit. Oh, and one — in spite of living 50 feet beneath the ice surface — was capable of withstanding radiation levels that are 5,000 times higher than anything else on earth has been exposed to.

Researchers have no idea why some of these microbes even developed, and they say that “no theory has been discarded.”

There’s been a ton of controversy over the findings, but according to National Geographic, those results were supported by more samples taken from another lake. This one — buried under half a mile of ice on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet — yielded samples so wildly unlike anything else we see in the world that they were cited as proof that life could exist in the harsh conditions found in space. What’ll happen when they’re released? Who knows!

With the ice, Antarctica looks like a mostly flat, barren wasteland. If the ice melts, we’d see something much different start to emerge. Glaciologists from the University of Waterloo and the University of Tasmania say (via The Conversation) that technology has finally advanced to the point where it’s allowing them to map the land that’s underneath the ice. They’ve found some incredible things, like more than 400 lakes (that are filled with actual water, not ice) that include the 6th largest in the world, Lake Vostok. There’s also a vast network of rivers, and a network of canyons that make the Grand Canyon look like amateur hour for canyon designers.

All of that would be revealed, and according to researcher Matthew Amesbury of the University of Exeter (via The Washington Post), it won’t just be barren. He says, “Our work shows that parts of it are green, and are likely to be getting greener.”

They say that although the ice-covered Antarctic is less than 1% green, they’ve found traces of hardy mosses beneath the surface of that ice. As of 2017, some areas — like the aptly-named Green Island — were already covered in colorful mosses. University of Massachusetts glaciologist Rob DeConto explains: “This is another indicator that Antarctica is moving backward in geologic time — which makes sense, considering atmospheric CO2 levels have already risen to levels that the planet hasn’t seen since the Pliocene, 3 million years ago, when the Antarctic ice sheet was smaller.”

In 2021, researchers from the UK Met Office and the University of Exeter released the findings (via CNN) of their study on what would happen to the planet’s weather patterns if Antarctica’s ice melted and revealed the terrain underneath. In short? Nothing will be the same.

They found that with the emerging land formations came major shifts in global wind patterns. That, in turn, led to “big increases in rainfall,” and that has consequences of its own — specifically, adding to rising ocean temperatures. They also say that monsoon seasons would become the norm, and there’s another huge problem. While the ice reflects up to 80% of the sunlight that hits it, the newly exposed land would absorb that light and heat. That would, of course, end up heating up the nearby oceans, too, which speeds up the whole process of the global climate going, what’s best described as, “to hell in a handbasket.”

Sounds unlikely? Researchers say they’ve found evidence that it’s happened before, in the Middle Miocene period. Once it happens, they say “it becomes harder for a large ice sheet to reform,” and all that means that the tipping point of Antarctica’s ice melt situation is less “Jenga played with wooden blocks,” and more “Jenga played with skyscrapers.”