This is the time of year when Antarctica should be cooling off rather than warming up, because it is heading into fall and winter there. And, in the far Arctic north, temps should still be icy cold, with the sun not yet peaking over the horizon after the long winter‘s darkness. So what is this bipolar temperature and weather anomaly news all about?
In both cases, plumes of warm moist air – similar to the water-laden “atmospheric river” that drenched Washington State and western Canada not long ago – from two different atmospheric river plumes have pushed through to the opposite ends of the earth to contribute to these unusual and nearly simultaneous phenomena at both poles.
Still, though, the arctic region is winning the highest-overall- warming-lottery for the whole earth. Warming in the arctic is causing shifting weather patterns and a broken jet stream. Young arctic sea ice is melting without fully regenerating in the wintertime over wide areas.
Down at 90 degrees south, we really need to keep Antarctica as cold as ever, to prevent drastic sea level rise. Ice that floats on the ocean in the arctic will not contribute to sea level rise when it melts, just the way your drink does not overflow when the ice in it melts. (There are other important negative effects from losing floating sea ice, but I will not go into those here now.)
No one would handle ice cores meant for science this way now. They would have hazmat suits on and treat them very specially, so as not to contaminate the samples. Perhaps these were done for practice!
Ice sitting atop land is another matter. When that melts, it is lost to use for crops and drinking, the same way as when mountain glaciers recede and the water flow down to the sea. Last year at the US base at the South Pole, temperatures stayed good and cold. It was the area near the “Pole for Cold,” which is out in Eastern Antarctica near the Russian base Vostok and a few other areas where the unusually warm episodes occurred. That makes these events even more puzzling and interesting.
Continental Antarctica is NOT a place where we want to see warm temps, because all of THAT ice would eventually contribute to sea level rise. The warming waters around Antarctica have already loosened and thinned key ice shelves surrounding the continent. If these deteriorate enough, all that perimeter glacial ice can slide down and break off into the surrounding sea. When you put ice into a full glass, then it will overflow. And, so it will go with the oceans.
It is too soon for a complete analysis to definitively say these temperature and weather anomalies at both poles carry the fingerprints of climate change as their sole cause. However, as is explained by a scientist quoted in the excellent article accompanying this blog post, human-influenced Climate Climate is “loading the dice” for events like these to happen more and more often.
Duncan Eadie, Ginny and Pen Hadow back at base camp after North Pole trek.