Correction to: Nature Reviews Earth & Environmenthttps://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-024-00638-7, published online 11 February 2025. In the version of the article initially published, the colour bar in Fig. 3 was labelled “Annual accumulated snowfall (kg m²)” and has now been amended to “Annual accumulated snowmelt (kg m²)” in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.

Antarctic atmospheric rivers (ARs) are a form of extreme weather that transport heat and moisture from the Southern Hemisphere subtropics and/or mid-latitudes to the Antarctic continent. Present-day AR events generally have a positive influence on the Antarctic ice-sheet mass balance by producing heavy snowfall, yet they also cause melt of sea ice and coastal ice sheet areas, as well as ice shelf destabilization. In this Review, we explore the atmospheric dynamics and impacts of Antarctic ARs over their life cycle to better understand their net contributions to ice-sheet mass balance. ARs occur in high-amplitude pressure couplets, and those strong enough to reach the Antarctic are often formed within Rossby waves initiated by tropical convection. Antarctic ARs are rare events (~3 days per year per location) but have been responsible for 50–70% of extreme snowfall events in East Antarctica since the 1980s. However, they can also trigger extensive surface melting events, such as the final ice shelf collapse of Larsen A in 1995 and Larsen B in 2002. Climate change will likely cause stronger ARs as anthropogenic warming increases atmospheric water vapour. Future research must determine how these climate change impacts will alter the relationship among Antarctic ARs, net ice-sheet mass balance and future sea-level rise.

Surface mass balance (SMB) represents the net effect of all processes that add or remove mass from the surface of an ice sheet. For the Antarctic Ice Sheet (AIS), snowfall is the primary SMB contributor, delivering ~2300 Gt annually (van Wessem et al. 2018; Agosta et al. 2019; Mottram et al. 2021). Sublimation represents the largest negative term in the AIS SMB, given that most surface melt refreezes within the firn (Mottram et al. 2021).