By Stu Winters

18-04-2024: The warmest temperature ever recorded in a permanent weather station in the Antarctic has been reached during an unprecedented heatwave in the Concordia-Dome C research station on March 18th, 2022. The unprecedented heat is being attributed to a powerful inflow of warm winds from Australia which brought temperatures over East Antarctica up to 47 degrees C or 85 degrees Fahrenheit, above average. This unusual and unprecedented warmth is breaking temperature records in the Antarctic, which is the coldest location on the planet. In a large part of East Antarctica temperatures anomalies are close to 30 ° C (54 ° F) above average for this time of the year. As reported by a weather station in Concordia over the Antarctic plateau, the temperature is almost 50 ° C (90 ° F) above average. These values make this heatwave exceptional for the internal portion of Antarctica.

Mild winds from Australia are being pushed towards Antarctica causing the warm inflow to reach the most internal part of The Antarctic Continent. The injection of warm air saw Australia’s Casey Research Station in the Antarctic coast register a maximum temperature of 5.6 ° C on Wednesday, March 16, the station’s highest March temperature on record, with data available back to 1989. There are 82 permanent research stations dotted across the Antarctic forty of which are open year-round. The joint Italian-French research station Concordia operates all year-long and was for that reason in an opportune position to record this unprecedented warmth.

The annual average air temperature at Concordia is −54.5 ° C (−66.1 ° F) and has never recorded a temperature above freezing. The warmest temperature ever recorded there was −5.4 ° C (22.3 ° F) this January. During this heatwave, the final high on March 18th in Concordia was -11.5. This represents the warmest temperature ever recorded in a permanent weather station of the Antarctic Plateau in its over 60 year existence. Antarctica’s peninsula, the area pointing toward South America, is one of the fastest-warming places on Earth. In just the past fifty years around 87 percent of glaciers along the peninsula’s west coast have receded. As a result, for the first time since satellite measurement began in 1979, the Southern Ocean ice coverage has dropped below 2 million square kilometres on February 25th, 2022. This represents a massive and rapid decrease in the extent of Arctic Sea ice.

The present sea ice conditions for the end of March are in line with the greatest negative anomaly ever recorded via satellite in Antarctica. For the past two years polar researchers have been recording rising numbers of disturbing meteorological anomalies. Glaciers bordering the west Antarctic icesheet are losing mass to the ocean at an increasing rate, while levels of sea ice, which float on the oceans around the continent, have plunged dramatically. “It is simply mind-boggling,” said Prof Michael Meredith, science leader at the British Antarctic Survey. “In sub-zero temperatures such a massive leap is tolerable but if we had a 40C rise in the UK now that would take temperatures for a spring day to over 50C.” Poleward winds are now carrying more and more warm, moist air from lower latitudes – including Australia – deep into the continent, say scientists, and these have been blamed for the dramatic polar “heatwave” that hit Concordia station.

Nor has this huge temperature hike turned out to be an isolated event. For the past two years scientists who focus on these polar temperature anomalies have been faced with rising numbers of reports of related meteorological anomalies on the continent. Glaciers which form the Antarctic icesheet have been losing mass to the ocean at an increasing rate, while levels of sea ice have plunged significantly, having previously remained stable for all the time for which they have been observed. These varied and related phenomena have raised concerns that the Antarctic is succumbing rapidly to the increasing levels of greenhouse gases that have been pumped into the atmosphere by fossil fuel-based industrialism.

Precipitous warming in the Arctic and Antarctic due to the warming of the Earth’s oceans – caused primarily by fossil-fuel burning – is causing concomitant losses of sea ice at the polar extremities. The dark waters that used to lie below the ice are being exposed causing solar radiation to be no longer reflected back into space as it would be by ice cover. Instead, that additional solar heat is being absorbed by the sea, further heating the oceans in the polar regions. “Essentially, it is a vicious circle of warming oceans and melting of sea ice, though the root cause is humanity and its continuing burning of fossil fuels and its production of greenhouse gases,” said Prof Michael Meredith, science leader at the British Antarctic Survey. “This whole business has to be laid at our door.”

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Image: Map showing the location of the Concordia station in the Antarctic. http://www.en.ilmatieteenlaitos.fi