Most climate impact research measures the physical world — ice loss, rising temperatures, shrinking ecosystems. It rarely asks a simpler question: does any of this actually reach the public? And if it does, who exactly is paying attention, and for how long?

I tried to answer that using five years of Google Trends data for the word "Antarctica," comparing the five Gateway Cities — Punta Arenas, Ushuaia, Hobart, Christchurch, and Cape Town — against five major world capitals with no particular connection to the continent at all.

Three things stood out.

First, a real climate story can travel on its own. When a genuine scientific finding broke — that parts of Antarctica are turning green — it triggered independent search spikes in Cape Town, Moscow, and New York, three cities with no coordination between them. A specific piece of climate science, reaching general publics across three continents, visible in nothing more than ordinary search data.

Second, language decides who gets the story, and when. In Punta Arenas and Ushuaia, the very same event produced search peaks at completely different moments depending on whether people were searching in Spanish or in English. Local audiences engaged as the story unfolded. International, English-speaking audiences only caught up once it became global news. Any communication strategy built around "reaching the public" in a Gateway City may, in practice, be reaching two separate publics that barely overlap.

Third — and this is the one I keep coming back to — global attention to Antarctica is constant but shallow, while a Gateway City's attention is silent, then sudden. Compared directly against New York, London, Moscow, and Tokyo on the same scale, those capitals show a steady, low-level curiosity about Antarctica nearly every week for five years — but it never climbs very high. Punta Arenas, by contrast, is silent about 80% of the time. And then something happens, and it spikes past anything those four capitals ever reach.

I put together a short brief on these findings for the AntClimNow cross-disciplinary workshop at SCAR OSC 2026 in Oslo, where researchers from very different fields come together to think about the impacts of Antarctic climate change. My angle isn't a typical one for that room — I'm not measuring ice or temperature. I'm asking whether the public ever finds out.

You can read the full brief below.

Read the full paper and poster