Owing to increasing greenhouse gas emissions, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet as well as a few subglacial basins in East Antarctica are vulnerable to rapid ice loss in the upcoming decades and centuries, respectively. This study examines the effectiveness of using Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI) that minimizes global mean temperature (GMT) change to slow projected 21st century Antarctic ice loss. We use eleven different SAI cases which vary by the latitudinal location(s) and the amount(s) of the injection(s) to examine the climatic response near Antarctica in each case as compared to the reference climate at the turn of the last century. We demonstrate that injecting at a single latitude in the northern hemisphere or at the Equator increases Antarctic shelf ocean temperatures pertinent to ice shelf basal melt, while injecting only in the southern hemisphere minimizes this temperature change. We use these results to analyze the results of more complex multi-latitude injection strategies that maintain GMT at or below 1.5°C above the pre-industrial. All these cases will slow Antarctic ice loss relative to the mid-to-late 21st century SSP2-4.5 emissions pathway. Yet, to avoid a GMT threshold estimated by previous studies pertaining to rapid West Antarctic ice loss (~1.5°C above the pre-industrial), our study suggests SAI would need to cool below this threshold and predominately inject at low southern hemisphere latitudes. These results highlight the complexity of factors impacting the Antarctic response to SAI and the critical role of the injection strategy in preventing future ice loss.

The specifics of the simulated injection choices in the case of Stratospheric Aerosol Injections (SAI) are part of the crucial context necessary for meaningfully discussing the impacts that a deployment of SAI would have on the planet. One of the main choices is the desired amount of cooling that the injections are aiming to achieve. Previous SAI simulations have usually either simulated a fixed amount of injection, resulting in a fixed amount of warming being offset, or have specified one target temperature, so that the amount of cooling is only dependent on the underlying trajectory of greenhouse gases. Here, we use three sets of SAI simulations achieving different amounts of global mean surface cooling while following a middle-of-the-road greenhouse gas emission trajectory: one SAI scenario maintains temperatures at 1.5ºC above preindustrial levels (PI), and two other scenarios which achieve additional cooling to 1.0ºC and 0.5ºC above PI. We demonstrate that various surface impacts scale proportionally with respect to the amount of cooling, such as global mean precipitation changes, changes to the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) and to the Walker Cell. We also highlight the importance of the choice of the baseline period when comparing the SAI responses to one another and to the greenhouse gas emission pathway. This analysis leads to policy-relevant discussions around the concept of a reference period altogether, and to what constitutes a relevant, or significant, change produced by SAI.