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When you’re studying weather patterns across Antarctica, recording breaking heat is pretty much one of the last things you want to see. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what June has wrought across broad swaths of the icy continent, with temperatures reaching an alarming 36 degrees Fahrenheit above average in some places.
As the Guardian reported, the record breaking temps hit on June 6, when researchers stationed on the Trinity peninsula — the northernmost point of the continent — logged temperatures as high as 15.4 degrees Celsius, or 59.72 degrees Fahrenheit, well above freezing.
“This is absolutely crazy,” climate professor at the University of Groningen Raúl Cordero told the Guardian. “It is also about 20C above normal for this time of the year. That is a huge anomaly.”
Chilean glaciologist Luis Muñoz told the publication he and a colleague climbed up to the top of the Collins glacier last weekend, on the very Northwestern tip of the peninsula. There, they found that “temperatures here went very high so everything outside melted.”
“Usually there is 20cm of snow and a lot of ice on the ground at this time,” Muñoz continued. During the trek, they observed that it was raining, and that the precipitation was warm enough to melt the surface ice. “There was a direct impact on the glacier, which should be receiving snow now. It should not be suffering ablation at this time of the year. This is obviously not good for the glacier.”
The Antarctic heat wave comes as the world has experienced its second-warmest May in recorded history. Along with a barrage of polluting tourists, Antarctica faces rapidly dwindling glacial coverage, embodied by the recent scramble to set up monitoring instruments along the fast-melting Thwaites glacier, commonly called the “doomsday glacier” due to fear that its disintegration could devastate coastlines across the world.
Scientists largely failed to deposit long-term monitoring equipment underneath the Thwaites, a scientific effort which had hoped to provide real-time insights as the glacier faces its now-inevitable collapse. However, they succeeded in taking a few snapshot measurements from the waters beneath the glacier, showing that temperatures were warmer than scientific models had assumed.
As the Cordero told the Guardian, a one-off heat wave won’t destroy Antarctica’s ice on its own. But it nevertheless follows decades of increasingly warm temperatures observed on the white continent, a troubling symptom of humanity’s noxious impact on the planet.
“This heatwave happened because of extremely strong westerlies,” Cordero explained. “This has been happening with increasing frequency since the 1980s, and that is known to be related to climate change.”
As a recent study from the Antarctic Research Center at Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington found, the ongoing melt-off could rise to ten times its current levels before the year 2100, unless we find a way to drastically reduce our carbon emissions.
“Under a scenario in which global temperatures rise by approximately 3.5 to 4C above pre-industrial levels, increased surface melting around the continent will leave ice shelves much more vulnerable to rapid collapse and sea-level rise,” Te Herenga Waka climate professor and the study’s co-author Nicholas Golledge explained in a statement. “In an extreme scenario where warming rises above 4C, the risk of rapid collapse becomes even more pronounced.”
More on Antarctica: Horrible Things Are Happening at Antarctic Facilities
