70 Degrees Warmer Than Normal in Antarctica

The coldest location on the planet has experienced an episode of warm weather last week unlike any ever observed, with temperatures over the eastern Antarctic ice sheet soaring 50 to 90 degrees 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 (right), a researcher studying polar meteorology at Université Grenoble Alpes in France. 

“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 70 degrees (40 Celsius) above normal for three days and counting, Wille said. He likened the event to the June 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 minus-50 or minus-60 degrees (minus-45 or minus-51 Celsius), they’ve been closer to zero or 10 degrees (minus-18 Celsius or minus-12 Celsius) – but that’s a massive heat wave by Antarctic standards. 

The average high temperature in Vostok – at the center of the eastern ice sheet – is around minus-63 (minus-53 Celsius) in March. But on Friday, the temperature leaped to zero (minus-17.7 Celsius), the warmest it’s been there during March since record keeping began. It broke the previous monthly record by a staggering 27 degrees (15 Celsius). 

“In about 65 record years in Vostok, between March and October, values above -30°C were never observed”, claimed Di Battista (right). 

Vostok, a Russian meteorological observatory, is about 808 miles from the South Pole and sits 11,444 feet above sea level. It’s famous for holding the lowest temperature ever observed on Earth: Minus-128.6 degrees (minus-89.2 Celsius), set on July 21, 1983. 

Temperatures running at least 50 degrees (32 Celsius) above normal have expanded over vast portions of eastern Antarctica from the Adélie Coast through much of the eastern ice sheet’s interior. Some computer model simulations and observations suggest temperatures may have even climbed up to 90 degrees (50 Celsius) above normal in a couple of areas. 

Of course, we shouldn’t attribute this one event to climate change, but if I understand correctly, rising temperatures helped prime conditions for such an event. 

I suppose climate change is “loading the dice” for more situations like this!