Researchers are increasingly concerned about a huge chunk of ice — larger in area than Mexico — failing to refreeze as seasonal temperatures drop in Antarctica.

"Unprecedented is a word that gets bandied around a lot, but it doesn’t really get to just how shocking this is," Hobbs, a sea ice scientist at the University of Tasmania, told The Guardian.

"There’s a sense that something weird is going on," Walt Meier, a senior scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado, told The Guardian.

We've seen strong declines in the amount of Antarctica's sea ice since 2016, with experts still debating how much human activity is contributing to the trend.

Concrete evidence is proving hard to come by, due to the complexity of the continent and its surrounding ocean's dynamics.

"The Antarctic system has always been highly variable," Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the University of Colorado Boulder, told CNN.

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