Both of the Earth’s poles have been hit by freakishly hot weather that has stunned climate experts.
Parts of the Arctic are around 30°C warmer than is normally expected at this time of year, while in Antarctica that figure jumped to more than 40°C hotter than average.
The unprecedented heatwaves were branded ‘not a good sign’ as concerns continue to mount about the climate crisis worldwide.
However, scientists have suggested that the weather could just be a random occurrence, as temperature records tumbled in Antarctica at the weekend.
The two-mile high Concordia station was at -12.2°C on Friday as autumn approaches.
The even higher Vostok station hit a shade above -17.7°C, beating its all-time record by about 15°C, according to a tweet from extreme weather record tracker Maximiliano Herrera.
The figures caught officials at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado, by surprise because they were paying attention to the Arctic, where areas around the North Pole were nearing or at the melting point, which is really unusual for mid-March, center ice scientist Walt Meier said.
‘They are opposite seasons. You don’t see the north and the south (poles) both melting at the same time,’ he said.
‘It’s definitely an unusual occurrence… pretty stunning’.
University of Colorado ice scientist Ted Scambos, who returned recently from an expedition to the world’s southernmost continent, said ‘Wow. I have never seen anything like this in the Antarctic’.
University of Wisconsin meteorologist Matthew Lazzara added: ‘Not a good sign when you see that sort of thing happen.’
Mr Lazzara monitors temperatures at East Antarctica’s Dome C-ii and logged -10°C on Friday, with the seasonal average being roughly -43°C.
He said: ‘That’s a temperature that you should see in January, not March. January is summer there. That’s dramatic.’
Both he and Mr Meier said what happened in Antarctica is probably just a random weather event and not a sign of climate change.
But they warned that if it happens again or repeatedly then it may be linked to global warming and something to worry about.
The Antarctic continent as a whole on Friday was about 4.8°C warmer than a baseline temperature between 1979 and 2000, according to the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer, based on U.S. National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration weather models.
That amount of heating over an already warmed-up average is unusual, Mr Meier said, comparing it to the entire United States being degrees 5°C hotter than normal.
At the same time, on Friday the Arctic as a whole was 3.3°C warmer than the 1979 to 2000 average.
The world as a whole was only 0.6°C above the 1979 to 2000 average and polar regions are warming up faster as a result of climate change than the rest of the world.
Antarctica did set a record for the lowest summer sea ice — records go back to 1979 — with it shrinking to 741,000 square miles (1.9 million square kilometers) in late February, the snow and ice data center reported.
What likely happened was ‘a big atmospheric river’ pumped in warm and moist air from the Pacific southward, Mr Meier.
And in the Arctic, which has been warming two to three times faster than the rest of the globe and is considered vulnerable to climate change, warm Atlantic air was coming north off the coast of Greenland.
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