ANTARCTICA: The coldest location on the planet has experienced an episode of warm weather this week unlike any ever observed, with temperatures over the eastern Antarctic ice sheet soaring up to 40 degrees Celsius above normal. The warmth has smashed records and shocked scientists.
“This event is completely unprecedented and upended our expectations about the Antarctic climate system,” said Jonathan Wille, a researcher studying polar meteorology at Université Grenoble Alpes in France, in an email.
“Antarctic climatology has been rewritten,” tweeted Stefano Di Battista, a researcher who has published studies on Antarctic temperatures. He added that such temperature anomalies would have been considered “impossible” and “unthinkable” before they actually occurred.
Parts of eastern Antarctica have seen temperatures hover 40C above normal for three days and counting, Wille said. He likened the event to the June 2021 heat wave in the Pacific Northwest, which scientists concluded would have been “virtually impossible” without human-caused climate change.
What is considered “warm” over the frozen, barren confines of eastern Antarctica is, of course, relative. Instead of temperatures being -45C or -51C, they’ve been closer to -18C or -12C) – but that’s a massive heat wave by Antarctic standards. – stuff.co.nz