At a Glance

A new study concluded 300,000 square miles of an Antarctic ice sheet was impacted by a melt event in January 2016.The water refroze, but scientists say it paints a daunting picture of the future of ice melt in West Antarctica.

Scientists have officially documented final results of a hugemelt event last year in West Antarctica, and it doesn't bode well for the future.

The study, , concludedJanuary 2016's ice melt at the Ross Ice Sheet impacted 300,000 square miles – larger than the state of Texas. The melt event occurred during a strong El Niño, a pattern that has brought several large melting events in the past, the study also said. This time, the pattern even brought rain to the ice shelf.

"The story of melt all over the ice shelf ," Robin Bell, an Antarctic researcher who wasn't affiliated with the study, told the Washington Post. "Who had heard of rain in Antarctica – it is a desert!"

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Ice crevasses are viewed near the coast of West Antarctica from a window of a NASA Operation IceBridge airplane on October 28, 2016 in-flight over Antarctica.

(Mario Tama/Getty Images)

It's important to notethat the meltwater refroze after it pooled on the surface for about two weeks, but scientists say this event is concerning nonetheless. The melting event lasted longer the usual, and while it's already known warmer ocean temperatures are causing the ice to melt from below, meltwater on the surface could accelerate the speed at which these ice shelves fracture and further contribute to sea level rise.

And if the continent were to lose the entire West Antarctica Ice Sheet, that could mean , a 2009study said.

"You probably have read these analyses of West Antarctica, many people think it’s slowly disintegrating right now, and it’s mostly thought to be from the warm water eating away at the bottom of critical ice shelves," study co-author David Bromwich, an Antarctic expert at Ohio State University, told the Washington Post. "Well, that’s today. In the future, we could see action at the surface of these ice shelves as well from surface melting. So that makes them potentially much more unstable."

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