“UNTHINKABLE”: ANTARCTICA EXPERIENCES FIRST KNOWN HEAT WAVE

Sun 20 March 2022:

The world’s coldest area has been experiencing high temperatures this week, causing meteorological specialists a great deal of alarm. Eastern Antarctica has experienced temperatures that are more than 30 degrees Celsius above usual, according to the statistics.

According to Etienne Kapikian, a meteorologist of France-Meteo, the Concordia research facility at Dome C, which is at a height of 3,000 meters (9,800 feet), recorded a record -11.5 degrees Celsius (11.3 degrees Fahrenheit) on Friday.

Generally, the temperatures start to fall towards of the end of summer but the Dumont d’Urville station on Antarctica registered record temperatures for March with 4.9C (40.82F) – a time when the normal temperatures were already supposed to be sub-zero.

“This event is completely unprecedented and upended our expectations about the Antarctic climate system,” said Jonathan Wille, a researcher studying polar meteorology at Université Grenoble Alpes in France, said in an interview with the Washington Post.

“Antarctic climatology has been rewritten,” tweeted Stefano Di Battista, a researcher who has published studies on Antarctic temperatures. He went on to say that temperature anomalies like this one would have been considered “impossible” and “unthinkable” in theory.

The average high in Vostok – which is at the middle of the eastern ice sheet – is around -53 Celsius in March. But, on Friday, it went up to -17.7 Celsius – the warmest it has even been for almost 65 years. It broke the previous monthly record by a margin of almost 15 degrees Celsius.

“In about 65 record years in Vostok, between March and October, values above -30°C were never observed,” wrote Di Battista in an email.

Vostok is a Russian meteorological observatory which saw the lowest temperature ever observed on Earth: minus 89.2 Celsius, set on July 21, 1983.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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