Struck by a heat wave, the east of Antarctica has recorded exceptionally high temperatures this week, more than 30 ° C above the seasonal normal.
Le Monde with AFP
Concordia’s search base, installed on Dome C of the Antarctic plateau at more than 3,000 meters above sea, has recorded on Friday a record heat of -11.5 ° C, “absolute record every month combined, flying The -13.7 ° C of December 17, 2016, “A Twitty Etienne Kapikian, forecasser at Weather-France.
While temperatures should have dropped with the late summer summer, the dumont base of Urville, installed on the Earth-Adélie coast, established a smooth record for a month of March, with +4.9 ° C, and a record minimum temperature of +0.2 ° C on March 18th.
“Change what we thought possible”
“The freezing days are occasional [at Dumont d’Urville], but they had never occurred after February 22nd (in 1991),” noted on Twitter Gaëtan Heymes , from Meteo-France. He described a “historical event of sweetness on the east” of the iced continent, with temperatures from 30 to 35 ° C above seasonal norms. “This is the moment when temperatures should quickly fall, from the summer solstice in December”, noted Jonathan Wille , researcher at the Institute of Environmental Geoscience in Grenoble. “This heat wave in Antarctica changes what we thought possible for Antarctic weather,” he added on Twitter.
Although it is not possible at the precise moment when an event occurs to assign it to climate change, one of the clearest signs of global warming is the multiplication and intensification of heat waves . The poles warm up even faster than the average of the planet that has earned about +1.1 ° C from the preindustrial era.
This heat wave in the east of Antarctica intervenes that at the end of February, Antarctic’s pack ice had reached its smallest area recorded since the beginning of the satellite measures in 1979, with less than 2 million km 2 , according to the national research center National Snow and Ice Data Center.