Abstract: The Antarctic sea ice extent has been slowly increasing contrary to expected trends due to global warming and results from coupled climate models. After a record high extent in 2012 the extent was even higher in 2014 when the magnitude exceeded 20 × 10(exp 6) km(exp 2) for the first time during the satellite era. The positive trend is confirmed with newly reprocessed sea ice data that addressed inconsistency issues in the time series. The variability in sea ice extent and ice area was studied…