Antarctica records temperature 38ºC above normal; scientists talk about record

Scientists were shocked this month when a research station in Antarctica reported unusually hot weather.

The temperature at the Concordia research station atop Dome C on the Antarctic Plateau – commonly known as the coldest place on Earth – rose to a staggering minus 11.5°C on March 18.

The normal high temperature for the day is about 49°C below freezing, which puts the March 18 reading about 38°C warmer than normal.

If the World Meteorological Organization actually tracked this particular data, scientists say it would likely set a world record.

“It appears to have set a new world record for the highest above-normal temperature excess […] already measured at an established weather station,” scientist Robert Rohde, chief scientist at Berkeley Earth, tweeted on Monday.

Randall Cerveny, a professor of geographic sciences at Arizona State University in the United States and a rapporteur on extreme records for the World Meteorological Organization, told CNN that this type of record – how hot or cold the temperature is – is not something the WMO tracks or verifies. But even so, he said, this reading seems legitimate.

“Everything I’ve personally seen about the observation of Dome C suggests that it’s a legitimate observation,” Cerveny told CNN.

While -11°C isn’t hot, it’s unheard of for this part of Antarctica, and 38 degrees above average is just as surprising.

It would be as if the high temperature in Washington (DC) on Monday – normally 16°C – was an unthinkable 55°C. In fact, the hottest ever recorded there on March 28 was 29°C.

The coldest place on Earth?

Concordia’s temperature was a record for the highest temperature not just for the month of March, but an “absolute record” for any month, according to Etienne Kapikian, a meteorologist at Meteo-France, the French meteorological service.

And it was not the only place to record high temperatures that day. Vostok, the Russian research base famous for recording the world’s coldest temperature, reported a high temperature of minus 17 degrees Celsius. The temperature broke the previous season record for March by nearly 27 degrees.

With more than 60 years of data collected, this record “is unprecedented in the history of climatology”, according to an analysis by Meteo-France. A unique combination of weather events had to occur for Mother Nature to turn up the heat in East Antarctica that day.

“Definitely a very interesting and unusual set of weather events triggered this event,” Cerveny told CNN.

There was “the wet flow of an atmospheric river” — storms pulling large amounts of moisture from the ocean over land, much like what the US West Coast sees in winter, Cerveny said. And there was also an intrusion of very hot air, rare for this time of year, in the Antarctic plateau.

The arrival of moisture trapped warm air, allowing temperatures to soar in East Antarctica.

While it’s rare, the possibility exists that these atmospheric ingredients came together before the time when humans were around to record it, John King, a researcher with the British Antarctic Survey, told the BBC. CNN.

“The Antarctic climate observation network is quite sparse and almost non-existent before the mid-1950s,” King said.

The extreme heat in Antarctica raises concerns about the long-term effects on the ice, particularly if it persists. An Antarctic ice shelf nearly the size of Los Angeles disintegrated in a few days of extraordinary continental heat.

But King noted that the impact of a single, short-lived heat “will always be small.” “While in the future such events will become more common, there would be significant impacts,” King said.