On March 18, 2022, temperatures peaked to minus-10 degrees Celsius. That’s warmer than even the hottest temperature recorded during the summer months.
In March 2022, temperatures near the eastern coast of Antarctica spiked 70 degrees Fahrenheit above normal — making it the most intense recorded heat wave to occur anywhere on Earth, according to a . At the time, researchers on-site were wearing shorts and some even removed their shirts to bask in the warmth. Scientists elsewhere said such a high in that region of the world was unthinkable.
In the new research, Blanchard-Wrigglesworth and his colleagues investigated how and why such an unimaginable heat wave could have occurred, especially at a time of the year when there is less sunlight. They found the extreme heat is largely part of Antarctica’s natural variability, though the warming climate did have some effect.
At the same time, Antarctica was experiencing its lowest sea ice on record, though the team said their work suggests that did not appear to influence the heat wave.Big swings in weather aren’t completely out of the ordinary in the polar regions, the study found. In an analysis of global weather station data and computer simulations, the team found the largest temperature changes from normal occur at high latitudes.
Meteorologist Jonathan Wille, who was not involved in the study, said he’s not surprised that this Antarctic heat wave registered as the largest observed temperature anomaly anywhere. After all, the Antarctic Plateau has some of the highest temperature variability in the world. But climate change could have had another effect the models didn’t test, such as the effect on the anomalous winds that brought the warm air mass to the continent in the first place. Wille said unusual tropical downpours in the weeks beforehand created an atmospheric circulation pattern that was never observed before - leading to the extreme heat.