“It’s the sea melting the ice from below, it’s not atmospheric melting from above. “We know the melting of Antarctica is most sensitive to lubrication by water,” he said. The latest reports from Antarctica raise concern that a perilous climate feedback cycle of warmer oceans and melting ice has started around the continent, said Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. Greenhouse gases, mostly from burning fossil fuels, are the force behind the warming of the atmosphere and the oceans.

It’s very difficult to warm the ocean, and so when we see these conditions, that really speaks to a very intense forcing.” A Dangerous Climate Feedback But for the parts of the shelf for which we do have that data, it really seems extraordinary. “We don’t have data going back 30 years for the entire region. “That’s a very significant region,” he said. The cruise covered an area more than 600 miles long and criss-crossed waters above the 125-mile wide continental shelf, documenting widespread ocean heating. He said ocean temperature readings going back to April 2022 speak to the persistence of the warm conditions off the Antarctic Peninsula. Please take a look at the new openings in our newsroom. They haven’t been common in this region.” “These episodes of relatively rapid ocean warming that can persist for months have been occurring all over the place. “But it seems to me that this might be a really unprecedented event,” he said. Moffat said it’s “too early, and difficult” to attribute this year’s conditions to long-term climate change until some peer-reviewed results are published. Such radical changes have already been sweeping the Arctic, starting in the 1980s and accelerating in the 2000s.ĭata collected during Moffat’s most recent research voyage includes the first readings from temperature and salinity sensors that were deployed a few years ago, which will give the scientists a starting point for comparisons. If such conditions recur in the coming years, it could start a rapid destabilization of Antarctica’s critical underpinnings of the global climate system, including ice shelves, glaciers, coastal ecosystems and even ocean currents. We don’t fully understand the consequences of this kind of event, but this looks like an extraordinary marine heatwave.” “We don’t know how long this is going to last. “Even as somebody who’s been looking at these changing systems for a few decades, I was taken aback by what I saw, by the degree of warming that I saw,” he said. Gould to collect data on penguin feeding, as well as on ice and oceans as chief scientist for the Palmer Long Term Ecological Research program. Research scientists on ships along Antarctica’s west coast said their recent voyages have been marked by an eerily warm ocean and record-low sea ice coverage-extreme climate conditions, even compared to the big changes of recent decades, when the region warmed much faster than the global average.ĭespite “that extraordinary change, what we’ve seen this year is dramatic,” said University of Delaware oceanographer Carlos Moffat last week from Punta Arenas, Chile, after completing a research cruise aboard the RV Laurence M.

Antarctica iceberg 2021