East Antarctica recorded temperatures above 30°C above normal this week, an “absolute record”, experts reported on Twitter.
The Franco-Italian research base Concordia, installed in Dome C of the Antarctic Plateau at an altitude of more than 3,000 meters, recorded last Friday a “heat” of 11.5°C below zero, “an absolute record for all months combined, exceeding 13.7°C below zero on 17 December 2016,” said Etienne Kapikian, from Météo-France, the National Meteorological Service of France.
Although temperatures should have dropped by the end of the southern summer, the Dumont d'Urville base, located on the coast of the Adelie Land, set the record for the mildest month of March, with +4.9°C, and a minimum temperature of +0.2°C on March 18.
“Frost-free days are occasional (in Dumont d'Urville), but they never occurred after February 22 (in 1991),” said Gaëtan Heymes, from Météo-France.
The expert described a “historically mild event over the east” of the frozen continent, with temperatures of 30 to 35°C above seasonal norms.
“This is the time when temperatures should drop rapidly, as the summer solstice occurs in December,” said Jonathan Wille, a researcher at the Grenoble Institute of Environmental Geosciences.
“This heat wave in Antarctica is changing what we thought was possible for the Antarctic climate,” he added.
For its part, the coastal base of Terra Nova was well above freezing at 7 degrees Celsius.
This caught officials at the National Ice and Snow Data Center in Boulder, Colorado by surprise, ice center scientist Walt Meier said.
“They are opposite seasons. You don't see the north and south (poles) melting at the same time,” Meier told The Associated Press Friday night. “It's definitely an unusual occurrence.” “It's pretty impressive,” Meier added.
“Wow. I've never seen anything like it in Antarctica,” said University of Colorado ice scientist Ted Scambos, who recently returned from an expedition to the continent.
“It's not a good sign when you see that kind of thing happening,” warned University of Wisconsin meteorologist Matthew Lazzara.
Lazzara monitors temperatures in East Antarctica's Dome C-ii and recorded -10 degrees Celsius last Friday, where -43 degrees Celsius is normal: “That's a temperature you should see in January, not March. January is summer there. That's dramatic.”
Both Lazzara and Meier said that what happened in Antarctica is probably just a random climate event and not a sign of climate change. But if it happens again or repeatedly, then it could be something to worry about and part of global warming, they said.
The Antarctic heat wave was first reported by The Washington Post. The Antarctic continent as a whole on Friday was about 4.8 degrees Celsius warmer than the reference temperature between 1979 and 2000, according to the University of Maine's Climate Reanalyzer, based on meteorological models from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
At the same time, last Friday the Arctic as a whole was 3.3 degrees warmer than the average from 1979 to 2000.
By comparison, the world as a whole was only 0.6 degrees Celsius above the average from 1979 to 2000. Globally, the average from 1979 to 2000 is approximately 0.3 degrees Celsius warmer than the average for the 20th century.
Antarctica set a record for the lowest summer sea ice, records date back to 1979, and fell to 1.9 million square kilometers by the end of February, reported the snow and ice data center.
What probably happened was “a large atmospheric river” pumped in warm, humid air from the Pacific to the south, Meier said.
And in the Arctic, which has been warming two or three times faster than the rest of the world and is considered vulnerable to climate change, warm Atlantic air reached north of the coast of Greenland.
Although at the time of an event it is not possible to attribute it to climate change, one of the clearest signs of global warming is the increase in the number and intensity of heat waves.
The poles are warming even faster than the planet average, which has increased on average by around 1.1°C since the pre-industrial era.
(With information from AFP and AP)
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