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The planet is heating up. We knew that. It is heating up much faster near the poles. We also knew that. However, how fast that warming has been remains a surprise.
The Arctic has warmed 0.75 degrees Celsius in the last decade alone, which is a much faster rate than the world average, according to a recent study.
Here comes a new study with bad news for the southern regions. The South Pole is also warming much faster than the world average - three times faster in the past three decades.
The lead authors of the study, a professor of meteorology at the Scalia Laboratory for Atmospheric Analysis in the United States and a climate scientist at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, attributed the rapid rate of warming primarily to natural climate variability. tropical intensified by increases in atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases.
The researchers, analyzing data collected from weather stations at the South Pole and based on climate models, found that between 1989 and 2018, this region of the planet warmed by approximately 1.8 degrees Celsius at a rate of +0.6 degrees Celsius per decade, which is three times the world average.
"The warming resulted from a strong cyclonic anomaly in the Weddell Sea caused by rising sea surface temperatures in the western tropical Pacific," the scientists explain. “This circulation, together with a positive polarity of the southern ring mode, advected warm and humid air from the South Atlantic towards the Antarctic interior. These results highlight the intimate link between the inner Antarctic climate and tropical variability ”.
During each year, much of Antarctica experiences extreme temperature changes with marked regional variations. However, most of West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula have experienced significant warming in recent decades, leading to the thinning of local ice sheets. The South Pole in the remote interior has also warmed significantly since the 1980s, according to scientists.
The study authors argue that the pronounced warming trends in Antarctica cannot simply be due to natural causes. Rather, our greenhouse gas emissions are likely intensifying these trends.
Written by Sustainability Times. Article in English.
