Temperatures 70 degrees above normal in East Antarctica have stunned scientists, who say the "unprecedented heat wave" has already changed the way experts think about the Antarctic climate system.
The extreme rise in temperature in East Antarctica, which is home to the coldest places on the planet, was recorded across the region, experts said. Temperatures at the Concordia Research Station, a Franco-Italian research station on the Antarctic Plateau, reached 10 degrees (minus-12.2 degrees Celsius) – or about 70 degrees warmer than average.
"This is when temperatures should drop rapidly from the summer solstice in December," Wille tweeted. "This is a 2021 Pacific Northwest heat wave type of event," he wrote, referring to the extreme heat wave that affected much of western North America from late June to mid-July last year. . "It should never have happened," he added.
Russia's Vostok station - which is located in the center of the eastern ice sheet and where the average high temperature this time is about minus 63 degrees (minus 53 Celsius) - hit a record zero degrees (minus-17.7 Celsius) on Friday.
Maximiliano Herrera, a climatologist and extreme weather tracker who runs the World Extreme Temperatures website, tweeted that the high temperature in Vostok broke the previous record by nearly 27 degrees (15 degrees Celsius). Antarctica's Terra Nova Bay hit 44.6 degrees (7 degrees Celsius), he added in his tweet, writing that "extraordinary anomalies in #Antarctica lead to historic records today."
Extreme weather was also recorded in the Arctic, where temperatures were more than 50 degrees (30 degrees Celsius) warmer than average. Walt Meier, an ice scientist with the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, called the situation at both poles "pretty amazing." "They are opposite seasons. You don't see the north and south (poles) melting at the same time," he told The Associated Press. "It's definitely an unusual occurrence."
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