A new study concludes that Antarctica is already being and will continue to be affected by more frequent and severe extreme weather events, a known byproduct of human-caused climate change.
Siegert said he and his team wanted to understand more about the causes of extreme events, and whether more of those events would happen as a result of burning fossil fuels, so the team synthesized research on a wide range of topics including atmosphere and weather patterns, sea ice, land ice and ice shelves and marine and land biology. The study found climate change extremes are getting worse in a place that once seemed slightly shielded from global warming’s wildness.
And it’s a change with links to human activity. “This is indeed a strong signature of climate change,” Helen Fricker, a professor of geophysics with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego who was not involved with the study, said in an email. “It’s not good.”
Sea ice and ice shelves work like a cork in a bottle, holding back glaciers that would otherwise rush into the ocean. When they disappear, glaciers flow many times faster. What’s more, the disappearance of large swaths of ice accelerates warming like swapping a white T-shirt for a black one on a hot summer day — replace ice with land or water, and suddenly the earth is absorbing the sun’s rays rather than reflecting them.
“I’m not an alarmist, but what we see is alarming,” said Waleed Abdalati, an environmental researcher at the University of Colorado not involved with the study. He said that extreme events are one thing, but when superimposed on a trend — a trend of global warming that heightens those extreme events — that’s a cause for concern. “We can handle events,” he added, “but we can’t handle a steady increase of those destructive events.
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