Researchers find record warming at remote South Pole
One of the most remote and isolated places on Earth – the South Pole – has warmed over three times the global rate for the past 30 years, a new study reports. This warming is linked to accelerating ice melt elsewhere in Antarctica, which could fuel more rapid rises in sea levels worldwide.
Although the warming at the South Pole is primarily from natural climate patterns, it’s been intensified by human-caused climate change, according to the study. The two factors “have worked in tandem to make this one of the strongest warming trends on Earth,” the study warns.
“This study clearly demonstrates that the remoteness of a region is no barrier to it being susceptible to rapid climate change,” said study co-author Gareth Marshall of the British Antarctic Survey in a statement.
The study was published Monday in the peer-reviewed British journal Nature Climate Change.
Study lead author Kyle Clem, a researcher at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, and his colleagues analyzed weather station data and climate models to examine the warming trend at the South Pole. Their study found that the strong warming over the Antarctic interior was chiefly driven by a natural warming of tropical Pacific Ocean water thousands of miles away.
“It is wild,” Clem told CNN. “It is the most remote place on the planet. The significance is how extreme temperatures swing and shift over the Antarctic interior, and the mechanisms that drive them are linked 10,000 kilometers (6,200 miles) north of the continent on the tropical Pacific.”
The South Pole warmed by roughly 1.1 degrees per decade over the past three decades, the study said.
“We have natural processes that are always going to be taking place amid global warming and human’s influence on the climate system,” Clem told CNN. “When the two work together it is quite remarkable.”
With an average summertime temperature of minus 18 degrees, according to NASA, no one will mistake the South Pole for a tropical paradise. Still, experts say the rate of warming at the bottom of the world is troubling:
“The real take-home message from Clem and colleagues’ (study) is that no place is immune to climate change,” write scientists Sharon Stammerjohn and Ted Scambos of the University of Colorado in an accompanying article in Nature Climate Change.
“Unless we take measures to flatten the curve on global carbon emissions, Antarctica’s contribution to a warmer world and sea-level rise could potentially be catastrophic, given the strong feedbacks and tipping points inherent in polar systems.
“The collateral damage will not just be accelerated warming and disappearing coastlines, but everything we value that sustains us,.”