While the Arctic melts apace with rising global temperatures, Antarctica is often seen as the literal polar opposite — frigid, unyielding, impervious to change. But a spot in the heart of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is one of the fastest-warming places on Earth, a new study shows.
From 1958 to 2010, the average temperature at the mile-high Byrd station rose by 2.4 degrees Celsius, researchers report online December 23 in Nature Geoscience. That warming is nearly twice what earlier, indirect studies had suggested.
“It’s a big number — about as big as the most rapidly warming places elsewhere on the planet,” says study coauthor David Bromwich, a polar scientist at Ohio State University in Columbus. “We were quite surprised.”