It's 70 Degrees Warmer than Normal in Eastern Antarctica. Scientists Flabbergasted
"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 50 to 90 degrees above normal," reports the Washington Post. "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 Universite 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 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 65 years ago. 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 aaabove -30C were never observed," wrote Di Battista in an email.... University of Wisconsin Antarctic researchers Linda Keller and Matt Lazzara said in an email that such a high temperature is particularly noteworthy since March marks the beginning of autumn in Antarctica, rather than January, when there is more sunlight. At this time of year, Antarctica is losing about 25 minutes of sunlight each day.
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