Even Antarctica is hit by extreme weather events, say scientists

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Even in Antarctica, one of the most remote and desolate places on Earth, scientists are registering temperature records and an increase in the size and number of freak weather events.

The planet’s southernmost continent is not insulated from extreme weather associated with human-caused climate change, according to a new report in Frontiers in Environmental Science that attempts to paint a coherent global picture of a place that has been a climate change anomaly. . Its western side, and especially its peninsula, have experienced a drastic thaw that threatens huge rises in sea level for centuries to come, while its eastern side has gained ice at times.

A western glacier is melting so fast that scientists are dubbing it “the glacier at the end of the world,” and there is an international effort trying to find out what’s wrong with it. In addition, Antarctic sea ice has gone from a record high to amounts well below what has ever been documented.

What lies ahead if the trend continues – which is likely if humans don’t reduce greenhouse emissions – will be a domino effect of consequences, from vanishing coastlines to increased global warming from major losses in a major source of ice, reflecting the sunlight. It is something that scientists have been watching for a long time and that now worries them even more.

“Changes in Antarctica are bad news for our planet,” explained Martin Siegert, a glaciologist, professor of geosciences at the University of Exeter and lead author of the report.

Siegert noted that he and his team wanted to understand more about what causes extreme events and whether more would occur as a result of burning fossil fuels, so the team synthesized their research into many aspects, such as weather and atmospheric patterns, ice at sea, land ice and ice shelves, as well as marine and terrestrial biology data.

The study found that extreme changes in climate are worsening in a place that once seemed only slightly shielded from runaway global warming. The continent “is not a static giant frozen in time”, they explained, but suffers the wrath of climate change and its extremes “in a sporadic and unpredictable way”.

Anna Hogg, a co-author of the report and a professor at the University of Leeds, said their work illustrates complex and connected changes between ice, ocean and air. “Once a big change has been made, it can be very difficult to reverse it in any way,” she said.

And it is a change associated with human activity. “There is indeed a strong footprint of climate change,” Helen Fricker, a professor of geophysics at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the study, said in an email. “Not good”.

Siegert and Hogg’s team looked at various factors including heat waves, sea ice loss, ice shelf collapse and impacts on biodiversity. Siegert described a heat wave last year in Antarctica that raised thermometers at a research station well above normal temperatures.

Hogg said sea ice is at a record low, a big cause for concern: In Antarctica, the July average for sea ice was well below the previous low, set for 2022. And ice shelves, which may Being the size of several large buildings, they are also threatened because they are melting and could collapse.

Sea ice and ice shelves act as brakes, holding back glaciers that would otherwise plunge into the ocean. When those tops disappear, the glaciers flow much faster. What’s more, the disappearance of large masses of ice accelerates warming like changing a white T-shirt for a black one on a hot summer day: by replacing the ice with land or sea, the Earth suddenly begins to absorb the Sun’s rays instead of reflecting them.

The issue of extreme events “is with us more often and will be with us even more often in the future,” said Peter Schlosser, vice president and dean of the Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University, who was not involved in the research. . Systems like Antarctica are extreme by nature, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t vulnerable, he noted, and they are very susceptible to small changes.

“I’m not an alarmist, but what I see is alarming,” said Waleed Abdalati, an environmental researcher at the University of Colorado who was not involved in the study. Extreme weather events are one thing, but when they’re framed in a trend—a global warming trend that exacerbates those extreme events—it’s a cause for concern. “We can manage the events,” he said, “but we cannot manage a continued increase in these destructive events.”

It’s something we need to prepare for, scientists say, both by continually reducing greenhouse gas emissions and by introducing adaptation measures for sea level rise and extreme weather around the world.

“We’ve been saying this for 30 years,” said Ted Scambos, an ice scientist at the University of Colorado whose 2000 report was cited in the Siegert and Hogg paper. “I’m not surprised, I’m disappointed. I wish we were taking action faster.”

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Seth Borenstein contributed from Washington, D.C.

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Melina Walling is on Twitter as @MelinaWalling.

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