Coastal ice domes in West Antarctica preserve snowfall records that reflect past climate conditions. Using weather reanalysis from 1979 to 2022, this study identifies which domes best capture different climate drivers affecting the region. Western sites respond mainly to hemisphere-wide wind shifts, while eastern sites reflect regional storm patterns. These results guide where future ice cores should be drilled to reconstruct past atmospheric and oceanic changes in this vulnerable region.

At least since we began measuring in detail, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has lost a lot of ice, but we don't know precisely how important climate change is in this. Here, we put a number on the role of climate change in retreat of a glacier in this ice sheet, for the first time. We show that climate change made the shrinking of this glacier much worse. Our work also suggests that what happened on very long timescales (the last 10,000 years) might also matter for retreat of the ice sheets today.