The South Pole may lie within the coldest region on Earth, but that doesn’t make it immune to global warming. Surprisingly, on the contrary, it has been the most affected region on the planet. And while the Antarctic plateau (where the South Pole is located) may see average temperatures ranging from -60°C during winter to just -20°C during summer, it has been warming more than three times quicker than the rest of the globe over the past three decades.
Global warming is generally perceived as an equal rise in overall temperatures worldwide. However, the reality is that some parts of the Earth are heating faster than others. Aside from the South Pole, the Arctic (on the opposite end of the globe) is experiencing a similar accelerated trend. There, the temperatures are rising twice as fast as the rest of the world.
These figures come from a study conducted by an international team of researchers, including scientists from the Victoria University of Wellington. They examined decades of weather station data, gridded observations, and climate models to determine the impact of climate change at the South Pole. Their results show that since 1989 the region warmed at over three times the global rate due to both natural tropical climate variability and increases in greenhouse gases.
Since 1957, scientists at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, Earth’s southernmost weather observatory, have been tracking the temperature. What all the data shows is that while other parts of the continent were warming and experiencing ice-sheet thinning throughout the late twentieth century; however, the South Pole was cooling until the 1980s, when it too began to warm. Between 1989 and 2018, the region warmed by 1.8°C – and that accelerated since the beginning of the 2000s.
After analyzing the weather data, the researchers focused on the 200 climate model simulations they conducted. The models involved observed greenhouse gas concentrations over the same period. The intention was to estimate the influence of human-induced climate change. The models show that around 1°C of the total 1.8°C of warming at the South Pole could be attributed to the recent increases in greenhouse gases.
Aside from human-induced warming, the team found that several of the South Pole’s warmest years correlated with hot temperatures in the tropics. So, the warming of the ocean in the western tropical Pacific is linked to the warming of the South Pole. However, further model studies show that warming wouldn’t have been as dramatic without human influence. Therefore, the tropical variability combined with increasing greenhouse gases caused one of the most influential warming trends on the planet.
On the topic of Antarctica and Arctic warming, several other studies have been published recently. Of those include Antarctica’s first heatwave ever recorded, record warm spells melting ice on the continent faster than ever before, masses of penguins dying, and permafrost in the Arctic thawing 70 years earlier than expected. The scary thing is, this is only the beginning.
