On Feb. 6, the ongoing impacts of climate change delivered a record-setting 65-degree day in the icy continent of Antarctica. Now you can see what that warming actually looks like.
The first image below is from Feb. 4, just a couple days before the arrival of the warm temperatures that lingered in the region through Feb. 13. The second photo shows us what that same region looks like after a week of higher-than-average temperatures.
In case it’s not clear, a lot of that ice and snow started to recede or disappear entirely by the time the heat wave ended.
Feb. 4
Image: joshua steven / NASA Earth Observatory
Feb. 13
Image: JOSHUA STEVEN / NASA EARTH OBSERVATORY
The record temperature of 18.3 degrees Celsus (or roughly 64 degrees Fahrenheit) was recorded on the Antarctic Peninsula, found at the northern end of the continent. The images above capture that same area, and you should pay particular attention to Eagle Island, the landmass near the botton of each image.
You can very clearly see how the snow accumulation has receded in the later photo, with more areas of exposed ground and rock. The light blue patch visible at the center of the island in the later photo is also notable as an example of how the snow is melting.
Mauri Pelto, a glaciologist at Nichols College, identified the blue patch as a “melt pond,” or a pool of water that formed on top of the ice as snow melted, in a report from NASA’s Earth Observatory. “I haven’t seen melt ponds develop this quickly in Antarctica. You see these kinds of melt events in Alaska and Greenland, but not usually in Antarctica,” Pelto said.
While the above images offer a dramatic example of the increasingly-hard-to-ignore effects of climate change, it’s even more alarming that February’s stretch of warmer temperatures in the Antarctic region was the third of the current season, following similar events in Nov. 2019 and Jan. 2020.
The images above were captured by the Operational Land Imager, a very high-tech camera (it’s so much more than that) aboard the U.S.-launched Earth observation satellite, Landsat 8.
