West Antarctica Is Warming at an Alarming Rate
For more than half a century, scientists at a remote outpost in western Antarctica have been tracking the region's weather and a new study, published in Nature Geoscience, comes to alarming conclusions: temperatures have climbed by 4.4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1958 -- twice as much as previously thought, making the area one of the fastest-warming in the world.
The new study, led by David Bromwich, professor of geography and senior research scientist at the Byrd Polar Research Center, focuses on newly recovered data from a single temperature record/source -- the Byrd Station, a scientific outpost in the center of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS).
Bromwich, along with geography doctoral student Julien Nicolas and geography graduate student Aaron Wilson, focused their attention on atmospheric temperature changes above West Antarctica, the region primarily responsible for Antarctic mass loss. They set out to reconstruct the only temperature record available from West Antarctica, namely from Byrd Station, a dataset that starts in the 1950s but is unfortunately riddled with gaps.
They found that the Byrd station has been warming in recent decades much more rapidly than previously thought; it is among the fastest warming places on Earth. Of particular concern is that the warming is partially taking place in the summer months. That's when the already seasonal warmth, plus the new higher average air temperatures, combine and increase the likelihood of major melting events that destabilize the ice shelves.
This finding has significant implications for the future of the ice sheet: continued summer warming in the near-future would lead to more frequent and extensive melting at the surface, which would in turn accelerate the mass loss from West Antarctica even further. And that can ramp up Antarctica's contribution to sea level rise worldwide.
“Those shelves hold back a lot of Antarctic glacial ice from reaching the sea,” explained Bromwich. “Lots of melting can do lots of damage to the ice shelves and we know that we are likely to see more melting events.”
Read the entire press release, courtesy of Pam Frost Gorder, Ohio State Research and Innovation Communications.
Bromwich's research has been featured in the following news outlets:
