“The glaciers drop large chunks of ice that can measure the size of Corsica”

“Temperatures up to 35 degrees above what is usually observed have been observed. That is to say that instead of having -45, -50, we had values ​​​​sometimes greater than -15 degrees in the interior”Explain, Gaetan Heymes, meteorologist. Director Géraldine Danon has just returned from Antarctica where she was able to meet scientists who are particularly worried about record temperatures. The latter showed him in particular how the pack ice was getting thinner and thinner. “There are more and more icebergs on the water“, she explains.

In mid March, a 1200 square kilometer block of ice broke off from a glacier. It’s the size of a city like Rome or New York. According to a study published in the journal Nature in 2018, Antarctica has lost 3 trillion tonnes of ice since 1992.”This is quite worrying insofar as Antarctica is the largest reservoir of fresh water on the planet, and if these episodes were to be repeated, they would cause possible destabilization of the ice caps, especially near the continent and could actually accelerate the transport of fresh water to the ocean and thus contribute to the rise in sea levels“, explains the meteorologist specializing in Antarctica.

At the same time, the Arctic also experienced record heat with temperatures 30 degrees above normal for the season.