East Antarctica this week recorded unusually high temperatures of up to more than 30C above normal, experts said on Twitter.
Concordia’s research base, located on Dome C of the Antarctic plateau, more than 3000 meters above sea level, recorded Friday a record “heat” of -11.5 ° C, “absolute record all months combined, beating the -13.7°C on December 17, 2016,” tweeted Étienne Kapikian, forecaster at Météo-France.
While temperatures should have dropped with the end of the austral summer, the Dumont d’Urville base, located on the coast of Adelie Land, a region of Antarctica, set a mild record for a month of March , with 4.9°C, and a record minimum temperature of 0.2°C on March 18.
“Frost-free days are occasional [à Dumont d’Urville]but they had never occurred after February 22 [un cas qui remonte d’ailleurs à 1991] “, noted on Twitter Gaëtan Heymes, from Météo-France.
He described a “historic mild event over the east” of the icy continent, with temperatures 30-35C above seasonal norms.
“This is the time when temperatures should drop rapidly, since the summer solstice in December,” noted Jonathan Wille, researcher at the Institute of Environmental Geosciences in Grenoble.
“This heat wave in Antarctica changes what we thought was possible for Antarctic weather,” he added on Twitter.
Although it is not possible at the precise moment an event occurs to attribute it to climate change, one of the clearest signs of global warming is the multiplication and intensification of heat waves.
The poles are warming even faster than the planet’s average, which has gained an average of around 1.1°C since the pre-industrial era.
This heat wave in East Antarctica comes as by the end of February the Antarctic sea ice had reached its smallest area recorded since satellite measurements began in 1979, with less than 2 million km2, according to the American research center National Snow and Ice Data Center.