Autor:Last week, the temperature in Antarctica hit almost seventy degrees—the hottest in recorded history. It wasn’t a one-day fluke. Famed for its snowscapes, the Earth’s coldest, wildest, windiest, highest, and most mysterious continent has been experiencing a heat wave. A few days earlier, an Antarctic weather station recorded temperatures in the mid-sixties. It was colder in Washington, D.C., where I live. Images of northern Antarctica captured vast swaths of barren brown terrain devoid of ice and with only small puddle-like patches of snow.
The problem is not whether a new record was set, “it’s the longer-term trend that makes those records more likely to happen more often,” John Nielsen-Gammon, the director of the Texas Center for Climate Studies at Texas A. & M. University, told me this week. “It’s sort of like a forest where trees are constantly growing and trees are dying, but if they start dying faster than they can grow back, then you eventually lose the forest,” he said. “The same thing applies to glaciers. Glaciers flow out to the ocean and break off, but if they break off faster then the glacier retreats and you lose ice—and then the sea level goes up around the world.”
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