Desperate Idea to Rein In Melting "Doomsday Glacier"

Map of Antarctica. The Thwaites glacier is seen 
to the left. If it melts global sea levels
could rise dramatically. 

Climate scientists for quite awhile now have been watching with dread something they've dubbed the "Doomsday Glacier."  

Before you get too panicked,  the glacier won't end the world.  But at some point, it might cause enormous trouble that would be felt around the globe.  

The official name of this thing is Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica. It's about the size of Great Britain, and it is melting.

The "Doomsday" label is because the glacier is so huge and is melting so fast, that its effects are already being noticed. The thawing glacier already accounts for four percent of the world's annual sea level rise. 

Were the glacier to entirely collapse, it would raise global sea levels by about 65 centimeters or roughly two feet. Hence the "Doomsday" label as that much of a sea level rise would be truly catastrophic for coastal cities and communities worldwide.  

Each centimeter of sea level rise would expose an estimated six million people worldwide to coastal flooding, so imagine what 65 centimeters would do. 

Oh, and if the Thwaites Glacier collapses, it could destabilize the much bigger ice sheet behind it. If that big ice sheet goes, that could add another 10 to 15 feet of sea level rise. This wouldn't happen tomorrow, but it's a big enough threat to start thinking about, even if the catastrophe is decades or even a century into the future.

At this point, there's no way to stop Thwaites Glacier from continuing to melt. But maybe people can slow the melt down.  And maybe slowing the melt rate would buy time while us humans struggle to stop the flow of fossil fuel emissions into the atmosphere.  If fossil fuel emissions stop, so too, would climate, eventually at least.  

 ut we are nowhere near that moment yet.

One off the wall, expensive but still perhaps viable idea is to put a huge barrier around Thwaites glacier to stop warm water from getting at it. 

According to Interesting Engineering:

"The proposed structure would be just under 0.1 miles (152 meters) tall and stretch roughy 50 miles across key parts of the seabed in front of Thwaites Glacier. Anchored to the ocean floor, the curtain would act as a physical barrier, limiting the flow of warm seawater that melts the ice shelf from below,"

"The plan faces major technical challenges. The structure would need to survive extreme Antarctic conditions, deep water pressure, moving ice and long-term ocean exposure. Even supporters acknowledge it could take years before any full-scale deployment is possible."

It would also be incredibly expensive, to the tune of several billion dollars. It's unclear from where that money might come.  The logic behind spending that kind of money on a Thwaites Glacier barricade is that it would still be way less expensive than dealing with an eventual 10-foot sea level rise. 

At the very least, this whole thing is a potential research opportunity. 

Probably with this giant, expensive curtain in the back of their minds, scientists are drilling way down through the glacier and deploying instruments to see how warm water is interacting with the base of the glacier.

Data will be transmitted daily via satellite for at least a year. It'll be a way to figure out how deep ocean water in a warming climate affects glaciers it comes in contact with. 

"This is one of the most important and unstable glaciers on the planet and we are finally able to see what is happening where it matters most,'" said Pete Davis of the British Antarctic Survey. 

I have no idea whether this barricade will ever get built or whether the collapse of this "Doomsday Glacier is imminent. But it's just one trouble spot in a world of potential crisis points brought on by climate change.  

Could A Small But Rapidly Disintegrating Antarctic Glacier Climate Change Danger Signal?

Hektoria glacier in Antarctica was largely reduced
to debris ice after it abruptly retreated at a record pace.
Photo by Naomi Ochwat

When you think of glaciers, and how they melt, you probably picture a slow, drip, drip, and maybe a little stream or river running out of the edge of it. 

You'd think it would take years, even decades for most of a glacier to wilt or disappear under pressure from climate change. 

But one glacier in Antarctica, the Hektoria Glacier, is breaking speed records for eroding, says a team of researchers led by Naomi Ochwat, a University of Colorado glaciologist.

Per the Washington Post;

"More than five miles of glacial ice in Antarctica vanished in only two months, retreating 10 times as fast as the previous record, with possible implications for the stability of other glaciers and the pace of sea-level rise on a warming planet."

 Hektoria Glacier is on the eastern side of the Antarctic Peninsula, and is pretty small compared to most glaciers in Antarctica. It'sabout the size of Philadelphia.  The peninsula is that finger of land that comes off Antarctica and points toward South America, like a frigid finger seeking out warmth away from the Antarctic ice cap. 

But the fact that it retreated so fast makes scientists wonder about other, much bigger glaciers. Can they, too, disintegrate as fast as Hektoria? Was Hektoria a canary in a coal mine, or since this is Antarctica, a penguin in a coal mine?

That would be a problem, as glaciers that are on land add to global sea level rise as they melt. A rapid melt might accelerate those rising sea levels beyond what many scientists already expect.

 It's already bad enough, as storms are increasingly bringing sometimes serious storm surges to coastlines. We also already have "sunny day floods" when tides are particularly high when the pull of the moon is just right. 

If all of Antarctica's ice melted, sea levels would rise by about 190 feet. Of course, much of Antarctica's ice is here to stay, but even if a small percentage its glaciers go bye-bye, sea coasts worldwide would be in big, big trouble. 

Here's how the Hektoria Glacier disintegrated, as WaPo tells us

"Heckoria is a tidewater glacier, meaning it flows across land before ending in the sea. After rising temperatures reduced the amount of sea ice in the bay abutting the glacier, waves broke down ice fastened to the coastline that had protected Hektoria. 

And, without that buffer, the floating end of the glacier began cracking and shedding icebergs into the ocean."

Once the glacier lost its floating portion, the rest of it thinned, and a gently sloping plain underneath the glacier let ocean water to seep in. The ice bobbed up with the water getting beneath it, so it broke up quickly. 

As usual with these things, there's disagreement over whether this is a one-off or if many other glaciers are on the brink of collapsing. 

There's something called the grounding zone. It's the spot beneath the glacier's ice where the ground ends and it starts to float on ocean water. 

The scientists looking into this don't exactly know where the Hektoria Glacier grounding zone is. If the grounding zone is further inland than the researchers figure, the glacier ice was already on water, making it more prone to breaking up. 

Ochwat said seismic sensors detected a bunch of little earthquakes when Hektoria was in retreat and falling apart. That probably means the ice was resting on bedrock. "Because that ice is touching the Earth, we get earthquakes," she said. 

The Washington Post said Ochwat is going to look at other Antarctic glaciers to see if they're also on slick, shallow beds that are vulnerable to fast retreats. 

The reason that people are worried about other glaciers is, of course, climate change. 

As CNN tells us:

"Hektoria's retreat was heavily influenced by climate change (Ockwat) said. The loss of sea ice in the ocean next to Hektoria, believed to have been driven by ocean warmth, allowed wave swells to reach the fast ice and break it up, leaving the glacier exposed to ocean forces."

As sea ice continues to decline due to climate change, more glaciers might be poised to fall apart like Hektoria did. 

Hektoria is "a smaller cousin to some truly gigantic - I mean the size of the island of Britain - glaciers in Antarctica that could conceivably go through the same process, as this whole evolution of the ice sheets on Earth evolves with global warming," Bethan Davies, a glacial geologist at Newcastle University told CNN. 

 There's another glacier in Antarctica, the Thwaites Glacier, which some overwroughtly call the "Doomsday Glacier" contributes 4% of overall sea level rise. Another one the Pine Island Glacier is Antarctica's fastest melting glacier. 

The bottom line: Antarctica makes climatologists nervous, and this new knowledge isn't exactly Zoloft  for scientist's climate change anxiety. 

We need to make sure scientists keep studying the hell out of Antarctica and its ice and its melt rate. What goes on in Antarctica doesn't stay in Antarctica.   

Antarctic Glacier Yields Body Of Long-Missing Meteorologist

Dennis Bell, right, celebrating Christmas, 1958 in
Antarctica. The next month, he died when he
fell into a glacier crevasse. His body was not
recovered  until earlier this year. 

 Climate change might have had a had in bringing a closure to an Antarctic tragedy that occurred more than six decades ago.  

In 1959, Dennis Bell, a 25 year old meteorologist, fell to his death into a glacial crevasse in Antarctica. Early this year, a Polish team found Bell's remains at the end of a melting, receding glacier. 

Bell was part of a group that climbed onto Ecology Glacier on King George Island, Antarctica to do some field research. 

Gizmodo picks up the story:

"The group split into pairs, and Bell and surveyor Jeff Stokes set off before the others. During the ascent, Bell moved ahead of the sledge without his skis to encourage the tiring dogs and disappeared into a crevasse. Bell survived the fall, however, and Stokes threw a rope down to him to pull him back up. 

Bell, however, had tied the rope around his belt rather than around himself. When his body reached the top of the crevice, he got stuck, the belt broke, and this time he fell to his death."

Bell's body was to found until this January, when a Polish team found bones near their base. Eventually, more than 200 personal effects were found nearby, including radio equipment, a torch, ski pols, an inscribed Erguel wristwatch, a Swedish Mora knife and an ebonite pipe stem, The Guardian reported. 

The remains were eventually taken to London, where DNA tests confirmed the remains belonged to Bell. 

The following will seem a little crass, since this involves a tragic death. But, I'll say it anyway. I'm not sure if the discovery of Bell's remains last January was the result of climate change melting the glacier enough to expose the the remains, or whether it was just the natural progression of the glacier that allowed humans to discover it all. 

As a memorial, Bell Point on King George Island was named in the honor of that meteorologist who died in 1959.   

Iceland Gearing Up For Atlantic Current Collapse

Iceland considers the risk of a critical Atlantic Ocean
current collapsing an existential threat. 

New research I posted about back in September about the possible collapse of a critical Atlantic Ocean current has Iceland on high alert. 

The newer research contradicted some earlier studies and said that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) could shut down as soon as the middle of this century.  

That's really bad, because the current is what keeps western Europe mild and wet. Without the current, winters in western Europe would become something like central North America, and droughts would take hold. In effect, western Europe would suffer through a sort of regional ice age. 

This mess would, of course, be due to climate change.  

The collapse of the current would also cause bad, bad, worldwide effects, such as greatly increased water temperatures along United States East Coast. That would cause an abrupt rise in sea levels, since warm water expands. It would also might make the eastern United States more prone to hurricanes and other big storms. 

The collapse of the AMOC would also mess up rainfall amounts and seasons that farmers in Africa, India and South America have relied upon for centuries. 

Then there's Iceland. 

Like most of the rest of the world, Iceland has been warming up, thanks to climate change. The island nation way up in the North Atlantic actually saw their first mosquitoes in recorded history this year because the region had warmed up so much. 

If the AMOC shuts down, Iceland would definitely earn its name. It, too, benefits from the warmth of AMOC. 

Even though an AMOC collapse might not happen for a few decades, if at all, it has put Iceland on full alert:

According to Iceland Review:

"Iceland has, for the first time, classified a climate-related phenomenon as a national security threat, following warnings that a key Atlantic Ocean current system may be approaching collapse."

......"The move allows authorities to coordinate response plans across ministries, covering food and energy supplies, infrastructure and transport resilience."

MSN continues the story: 

"It is a direct threat to our national resilience and security.' Iceland Climate Minister Johann Pall Johansson said by email '(This) is the first time a specific climate-related phenomenon has been formally brought before the National Security Council as a potential existential threat.'"

Iceland is looking at a full range of possible effects of an AMOC crash, such as energy supplies, food security, infrastructure and transportation, both internal and with other nations.  

Other nations are taking notice, too. 

For instance, Ireland's weather service scientists briefed the nation's prime minister on the AMOC issue. Norway's environmental ministry said it was "seeking to deepen our understanding of the issue through new research" before determining whether to classify AMOC as a security risk,' MSN reported. 

INTERCONNECTED CHAOS

Of course, nobody knows when or if the AMOC will grind to a halt. If that happens, scientists think it would make Antarctica warm up even faster than it is now.

Newly released research also suggest that melting around West Antarctica now could help preserve the AMOC, or at least slow its demise.   

According to New Scientist:

"..it won't be enough to prevent major changes to the climate. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) would still decline buy 60 percent, and its full recovery would take 3,000 years."

Which seems to me a little long to wait, don't you think?

As always, there's a lot of ifs, questions and blank spots in the research done by Sacha Sinet at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. 

 New Scientist again:

"According to simulations by Sinet and his colleagues, the timing of the melting is key. If a centuries-long pulse of Antarctic meltwater arrives at the same time as massive melt from Greenland, it will only see up the AMOC shutdown. 

If the Antarctic water arrives about 1,000 years before the peak of Greenland's melting, however, the AMOC would weaken for several hundred years, but then recover over the next 3,000 years. While the AMOC eventually recovered in all scenarios, this early Antarctic melt prevented its total collapses and sped up its revival." 

In other words, climate change isn't as simple as the world just warming up. Everything is connected, so expect the unexpected when it comes to climate change. 

Coral And Antarctic Sea Ice Climate Change Tipping Points Underway?

Coral bleached out from exposure to too-hot water
If this goes on for too long, the coral dies. 
Coral reefs worldwide are now suffering
from big bleaching events. 

Scientist are eyeing coral reefs and Antarctic ice more than ever lately as the two wildly different parts of nature seem to be headed toward what is known as climate tipping points. 

Climate tipping points are defined as critical thresholds that, when exceeded, can create huge, irreversible changes in ecosystems. 

Recent studies have found that we are at, or about to reach two big climate tipping points. One in the tropics, one in the icy environment around Antarctica. 

All this is part of the second Global Tipping Points report from the University of Exeter's Global Systems Institute in England. The report examines some of the fundamental processes that support life on the planet and how close they are to suffering permanent damage. 

CORAL REEFS

In recent years, we've heard about coral bleaching, in which these organisms lose their colorful appearance and turn ghostly white and die, due to the water temperatures being too hot to support them. 

As climate change warms the oceans, these bleaching or diebacks are becoming more common. 

Now, according to CBS News:

"Scientists have determined that the 'tipping point' for coral reefs begins the global warming reaches 1.2 degrees Celsius, with somewhere between 70 and 90 percent of coral dying when that number climbs to 1.5 degrees. 

About 84 percent of the world's coral reefs had bleaching this year in the most intense event of its kind in history, according to the International Coral Reef Initiative."

Sure, coral reefs are pretty, but most of us won't get to see them. So if they die back, is it really a big deal? 

The answer is a loud yes. Coral reefs provide habitat for about 25 percent of all  underwater species. They also support the livelihoods of about a billion people. 

The past two years have been the warmest recorded on Earth. Though 2025 will be a tiny bit cooler than the previous two years, it won't be by much. With such intense warmth, coral reefs have reached their breaking point. 

ANTARCTIC ICE 

This chart shows pretty stable levels of ice
around Antarctica until around 2000. Then
it began to increase. But starting a
decade ago, the amount of ice began to
drop sharply. 

A paper in the journal Nature describes previously unnoted details of interrelated effects of abruptly melting ice. 

The study in the journal Nature stated: 

"A regime shift has reduced Antarctic sea ice extent far below its natural variability of past centuries, and in some respects its more abrupt, non-linear and potentially irreversable than Arctic sea ice loss." It also said.

 Evidence is emerging for rapid, interacting and sometimes self-perpetuating changes in the Antarctic environment. "

According to Reuters, the study gathered data from observations, ice cores, and ship logbooks to charge long-term changes in the area of sea ice, putting into context a rapid decline in recent years. 

That decline means a smaller ice sheet at the bottom of the world. Ice reflects the sun's heat back, to space, So less ice in and around Antarctica means more warmth is sucked in by the planet, making climate change that much worse. 

Reduced Antarctic ice  can shift ocean currents, which changes the distribution of krill, phytoplankton and other sources of nutrition for larger animals in the region, like emperor penguins. 

The amount of Antarctic ice remained pretty stable for at least the century ending around 2000, making life relatively predictable for the region's ecosystem.

Then. as the new century began,  the level of Antarctic ice began to increase, contrary to what you'd expect from climate change. Scientists suspect increased snowfall due to a warming world's ability to produce excess precipitation, in this case, snow, was partly responsible.

After that, suddenly, around a decade ago, the amount of Antarctic ice began to plummet rapidly. The amount of ice is now well below where it was during most of the 20th century. The decline so far shows no real sign of stopping or slowing down. 

The loss of coral reefs and the Antarctic ice situation are two examples of how one effect of climate change can have a snowball effect, making other aspects of a warming world worse, and also accelerate the rate of warming. 

 , opens new tab 

Penguin Poop Might, Maybe Helping Slightly In Fight Climate Change

This tasteless penguin photograph illustrates how
"buttloads of penguin guano" as the Washington 
Post put it, could be affecting climate change a little. 

 You read the headline correctly. Scientists are studying whether penguin poop is having at least a tiny effect on climate change.  

Sounds like something Republicans would use as example of ridiculous government spending, but hear me out. (And it looks like very little, if any American taxpayer money is being used to study this).

The story, of course, takes us to Antarctica, where, of course, you will find penguins. Lots of penguins. Who really know how to take a crap, apparently. 

Per the Washington Post:

"As millions of penguins eat and breed in Antarctica, they leave behind buttloads of guano. Given that they mainly feast on fish and krill, their excrement contains large amounts of nitrogen waste that breaks down into ammonia. 

Scientist found that incredible amounts of ammonia left behind combine with sulfur compounds from the ocean and grow clouds within hours."

By the way, I love the phrase "buttloads of guano."  It should be the name of a punk rock band.

Anyway, preliminary work involving computer models suggest that clouds that the penguins help produce have a cooling effect on parts of Antarctica. But that conclusion is, well, inconclusive and complicated.

More often than not, clouds reflect the sun's heat back to space, so they have a cooling effect on the Earth. In fact, an overall decline in low clouds over the Earth in recent years partly explain why 2023 and 2024 were the two hottest years on record for the globe.

Ice reflect more sunlight than clouds do.  So in the penguin cloud poop from over the oceans surrounding Antarctica, that would help blunt climate change. If they form over Antarctic ice fields, then it might just worsen climate change a tiny bit. 

Past studies suggest that the penguin crap producing clouds have an overall benefit in the fight against climate change. 

Per Washington Post again:

"...computer models from previous studies hint that the net effect would likely cool the surface. A study in 2016 looked at clouds over the Arctic from seabird guano and showed a cooling effect over the region - exceeding 1 watt per meter square near the large seabird colonies. The study's computer models showed the clouds consisted of more droplets, but smaller ones, which reflected more sunlight back to space."

Of course, pooping penguins won't be our savior from climate change. Their effect on it is minuscule, at least in the large scheme of things. 

But it's still important to consider.  WaPo one more time as they quoted Ken Carslaw, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Leeds who was not involved in the research.

"It's vital to understand these natural environments are the baseline from which we quantify and understand human effects on climate,' (Ken) Carslaw said. 'These observations are another piece of the puzzle that will help to improve how clouds are represented in climate models'"

 

Why Worsening Antarctic Ice Problems Are Your Problem, Too

Two new reports paint a worrying picture of Antarctic
ice, which is a problem for the whole world. 

 The amount of sea ice surrounding Antarctica reached a new low for the end of winter, increasing worries that the South Pole and surroundings are now in an ice decline similar to the Arctic at the top of the world, the Washington Post reports.

Additionally, according to another article the Washington Post, 40 percent of Antarctica's ice shelves - which are separate and different from sea ice - have dwindled in the past quarter century, and that's allowing more land ice to flow into the oceans. The extent of ice shelf melting is more extensive than previously thought. 

Yes, this stuff is oh-so-distant away from us, so you'd think who cares?  Well, everyone should. What goes on in Antarctica doesn't stay in Antarctica.

The Antarctic ice problems will probably worsen sea level rises on every coastline around the world. If you don't live anywhere near the coast, the ice crisis in Antarctica might worsen the climate changed we're all already feeling. 

SEA ICE ISSUES

 The sea ice around Antarctica usually reaches its peak in September, when winter is ending in the Southern Hemisphere and spring is beginning.

This year, the maximum sea ice extent around Antarctica this September was the lowest on record. As the Washington Post reports, the season's maximum ice extent around Antarctica was reached on September 10 - much earlier than normal, The ice was remarkably lacking. Says the Post:

"At that time, the annual ice coverage was at a record low of 6.55 million square miles - a whopping 398,000 square miles lower than the previous low set in 1986."

That's still a lot of ice.  But any decline is worrying. A lack of sea ice won't directly increase sea levels.  Ice melting on an ocean is like an ice cube melting in your gin and tonic. It won't increase the amount of liquid in your glass.

But sea ice is white. Or at least white-ish. It's great at reflecting sunlight out to space. That, in turn, helps air condition all of Earth. Open ocean is darker and absorbs sunlight, helping to warm the world.  It's called a positive feedback.

Climate change is already boosting global temperatures.Then the effects of that warming, in this case a dark surface to absorb the sun't heat, accelerates the mess even more.  

ICE SHELVES LOSING

Also, the sea ice surrounding Antarctica stabilizes the ice sheets on the continent or near its shore. The new lack of sea ice, and that darker water absorbing the sun's heat, could allow warmth to further eat away at the ice sheet,  glaciers and ice shelves

Ice shelves are enormous floating pieces of ice extending out into the ocean from glaciers on land in Antarctica. They act like dams in a way, slowing the flow of ice on the land into the oceans. Ice shelves surround most of Antarctica's coastline. 

That study I mentioned at the beginning of this post about the ice shelf decline is probably more serious than this year's crappy sea ice extent around Antarctica. 

Damage the ice shelves and you damage the ability for Antarctica to hold onto its immense glaciers.  That glacial ice flows into the oceans, melts and helps accelerate sea level rise around the world. 

Says the Washington Post: 

"'The surprising result to me was just how many ice shelves are deteriorating that substantially and continuously,' said Benjamin Davison, lead author of the study. 'Lots of ice shelves not just the big ones, are steadily losing mass over time with no sign of recovery."

The study sounds like a lot of work, but I guess most scientists are used to this. The team analyzed more than 100,000 satellite images from 1997 to 2021.   During that time, 71 of 162 ice shelves lost mass, another 29 managed to get a little bigger and the rest didn't change much one way or the other. 

West Antarctica showed the biggest ice shelve diminishment, and the numbers are huge. The Getz Ice Shelf lost 1.9 trillion tons of ice over the 14 years analyzed. Another ice shelf lost 1.3 trillion tons. 

In West Antarctica, warming ocean water is undercutting the ice shelves, prompting them to melt. The ice shelves in East Antarctica are much more stable, because the water along the immediate coast there has still managed to stay almost as cold as it ever was.

The scientists said you don't need a complete collapse of most or all of the ice shelves to cause real problems. As long as many are weakening, more land-based ice can flow into the water to melt, and raise those global sea levels. 

This is all just one more thing to worry about in the age of climate change. 

 

Antarctic "Doomsday Glacier" Label Is An Exaggeration, But Still A Big Problem For World.

They call it the "Doomsday Glacier" but how much is
this disintegrating ice shelf in Antarctica going to raise
sea levels. Could be a lot - eventually 

 Scientists are beginning to get a better handle on trouble with a so-called "Doomsday Glacier" In Antarctica that is falling apart a lot faster than climate experts would like. 

As the Associated Press tells us, polar scientist Britney Schmidt of Cornell University created a robot to poke around this glacier, whose real name is the Thwaites ice shelf. 

 Reports the Associated Press: 

"Before, scientists had no observations from this critical but hard to reach point on Thwaites. But with the robot named Icefin lowered down a slender 1,925 hole, they saw how important crevasses are in the fracturing of the ice, which takes the heaviest toll on the glacier even more than melting. 'That's how the glacier is falling apart. It's not thinning and going away. It shatters, said Schmidt, lead author of one of two studies in Nature."

That shattering accelerates the overall erosion of the ice shelf, scientist said.  

The glacier is about the size of Florida. People call it the Doomsday Glacier because if it all melts, global sea levels would rise by two feet, not including sea level rise from other sources. 

The good news is that it will take a few centuries for all of the Thwaites ice shelf to melt.  

On a geological scale, however, the changes with Thwaites are super rapid. Warmer water is eating away at the ice shelf from below. 

More from the AP:

"'Thwaites is a rapidly changing system, much more rapidly changing than we started this work five years ago, and even since we were in the field there years ago,' said Oregon State University ice researcher Erin Pettit."

Petitt wasn't part of the study mentioned above. But she continued:  "I am definitely expecting the rapid change to continue and accelerate over the next few years." 

Weird Antarctic Heat Wave Might Not Directly Affect Us, But Scientists Are Freaked Out

Scientists at the Concordia station in Antarctica recently
dressed for the beach as temperatures shattered previous
all-time records for heat. It wasn't the tropical paradise
depicted in the photo. That record smashing high 
temperature was 10 degrees above zero. 

  As frigid Antarctic heads into their even more bone chilling autumn, a strange heat wave earlier this month  has shocked scientists. 

Temperatures on the eastern Antarctic ice sheet were 50 to 70 degrees above normal. Scientists on site even stripped down to shorts and t-shirts or no shirts outdoors to mark the unprecedented event, the Washington Post reported.

The departures from normal were likely the largest recorded on Earth.

It wasn't exactly a tropical vacation, however. This is the most frigid part of the globe and temperatures in much of the area affected by the extreme Antarctic "heat" stayed well below freezing.

For instance, the Russian observatory Vostok, just 808 miles from the South Pole and 11,444 feet above sea level so is frigid. In March, the average high temperature there is a gelid 63 below zero Fahrenheit. In the record heat wave this month, Vostok hit an even 0 degrees Fahrenheit, which shattered the previous March record high by 27 degrees, the Washington Post reported. 

The ever so slightly Concordia Research Station in Antarctica reached 10 degrees above zero during the hot spell, which was the all-time hottest temperature there. The old record was 7 degrees and the normal high temperature in March at Concordia is 56 below, says the Washington Post. 

Remember, this is March, so Antarctica is past their summer, so to speak. 

Still these readings really are unheard of.  For perspective, when we have record heat in Vermont, temperatures are usually 20 or 30 degrees above normal. If temperatures were 70 degrees above normal in Burlington today,  The hottest it's ever been in Burlington is 101 degrees.   

Temperatures in the Arctic and Antarctic often get further above and below normal than in places in the mid latitudes, like here in Vermont. In those places, readings can be 30 or 40 degrees above or below normal with some regularity at the poles.

But 70 above normal is not something scientists have seen. Even at or near the Earth's poles. 

Caused by atmospheric river, a narrow corridor of very warm, wet air that came inland from the Pacific Ocean near Antarctica.   Despite the exceptional warmth, and some rain, it was not toasty enough to cause significant ice melt.  Had this occurred earlier in the Antarctic "summer" the melt would have been worse, the Washington Post notes. 

At least a large portion of this odd heat was probably just a random event.  But it was so extreme that scientists are still very concerned.  Especially since "unprecedented" heat waves keep popping up around the globe. 

Jonathan Wille, a researcher studying polar meteorology at Grenoble Alpes University in France told the Washington Post, comparing an unprecedented heat wave in the northwestern United States and southwestern Canada last June, and the heat wave that just hit Antarctica.  that the heat wave

"...was something that wasn't thought to be possible until it actually happened. It was never observed before, and the atmospheric patterns that led to it happening were just not thought to be possible either until it happens. And that's what's basically happened here over Antarctica."

IT'S COMPLICATED

Antarctica, seemingly a vast, frozen and still place, has a lot of moving parts. With climate change looming,  many of these shifting pieces worry scientists. 

It's not just heat waves that melt Antarctic ice from above that you need to worry about. 

Even if surface areas in large parts of Antarctica stay cold enough such that not much melts, ocean water that is slightly warmer than it used to be can sneak beneath the ice shelves floating on the water and clinging to the edges of the continent. 

This can enable the ice shelves to melt from below, eventually weakening them or even breaking them up.  With the ice shelves out of the picture, glaciers on Antarctica's land are more free to flow faster into the water, where they will melt and raise sea level s globally. 

There's one ice shelf in particular, called Thwaites, that is already showing signs of instability. If it goes, a glacier behind it would move quickly (at least relatively so for a glacier) into the ocean.  If, theoretically just that one glacier were to entirely melt, global sea levels would rise by a little more than two feet. Not good. 

What you might call summer in Antarctica is about to end, and climate scientists might be especially grateful for that this year. 

Sea ice extent around Antarctica reached its lowest level since the first starting keeping track of it back in 1979.

That sounds like a sure sign that climate change is asserting itself, but in the case of Antarctica, not really. Or at least we don't know. 

The Guardian helps us sort out this year's lack of Antarctic sea ice as follows:

"Dr. Walt Meier, a senior research scientist with the NSIDC, said it coincided with strong wins over part of the Ross Sea that had pulled ice to the north, where it melted in warmer waters or was broken up by waves.

This pushed the sea ice extent - the area of the ocean covered by at least 15 percent floating ice - to below the previous record set in 2017. But scientists expressed caution about attributing the retreat to the increase in global temperatures linked to greenhouse gas emissions."

Unlike the Arctic, which has really been losing over the past couple of decades, Antarctica has been all over the place.

Antarctic sea ice extent had been often setting record highs up through 2014, but in the past eight years it's been generally declining.  That's too short a time to conclusively pin the blame on climate change. 

The best that scientists can say is "maybe." According to the Guardian:

"Dr. Will Hobbs, who studies Antarctic sea ice with the Australian Antarctic Program Partnership, said the latest record was significant. There had been an expectation that after the record low of 2017 the ice would recover he said. 

'But now we have these two events in five years that are off the records,' he said. 'You can't say this is climate change, but we do now have to consider whether or not the system is starting to change.'"

The reason why we care about sea ice at the bottom of the world is that it helps keep the massive Antarctic ice cap in place. Lose the sea ice, and the Antarctic ice cap starts melting and sliding off into the sea.  Let that go on too much and global sea levels rise dramatically.  

The sea level is already going up at a faster pace than it did just decades ago and it's going to get fastest yet, and soon, as I reported back on February 15.

So yeah, climate scientists are really interested in what's going on in Antarctica.  There's plenty of research going on. .

Here's an example, according to According to Vox: 

"New research finds that some of the most profound changes to Earth's ice are largely invisible because they're happening far beneath the surface. Land ice and ice shelves are wearing thin from below and it's happening much faster than previously expected."

The chilly air above the South Pole tends to keep ice frozen from above and around its edges. But deep Antarctic waters aren't quite as frigid. 'At a depth in the Southern Ocean, there is a tremendous amount of heat energy below a few hundred meters down' said (British Antarctic Survey geophysicist Robert Larter). This warmer water can then come into contact with the underside of ice shelves, causing them to melt. 

The water in question is barely above freezing. However, if it warms up just a bit, that can make a big difference. 

There's a LOT we don't know about Antarctica, and how what happens there is related to climate change. We do know that what happens in Antarctica doesn't necessarily stay in Antarctica. Yeah, it's a distant, unpopulated place. But with climate change, it's still a place that can come back to bite us. 

A Warm Global January Continues The Long Trend; Long Hot Summer In Antarctica Too

January, 2022 was warm in most places in the world 
compared to previous Januaries, continuing a long
unrelenting trend in global warming 

The monthly global climate review from NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information came out today to say that January, 2022 followed in the footsteps of much of 2021,  

To wit, January was the world's sixth warmest on record. That follows the trend of 2021, when many months were around fifth or sixth hottest.

That all makes sense, because the ocean patterns are in a La Nina phase, which features cool waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean off of South America. La Ninas tend to cool the world, so we're not seeing the monthly "hottest on record" reports we were seeing during the opposite El Nino a year or two back. 

It all means that climate change is roaring right along, especially since we continue to score "Top 10" warmest months during what should be a cooler phase.   NOAA has already concluded that 2022 will be among the top 10 warmest on record.  Or at least there's a 99 percent chance of that happening. The period of reliable records goes back 143 years. 

And yes, I know we here in Vermont had the coldest January since 2009, but we're a mere dot if that on the globe.  What goes on in Vermont certainly does not stay in Vermont. If you are under the age of 46, you have never seen a global January that was cooler than the 20th century average.

Meanwhile, a warm summer, at least for Antarctica, helped drive drive sea ice extent at the bottom of the world to its second lowest level on record.  If you're looking for a glimmer of hope, of sorts, Arctic sea ice extent was the largest since 2009. But that's not saying much. The Arctic sea ice extent was still below normal for the month. 

We're only half way through February, but I don't see any signs that the global "top ten warmest" trend will end by the time we get all of this month's data in.