The UN’s World Meteorological Organisation published the highest temperatures on record in three Antarctic zones on Thursday, setting a benchmark for studying how climate change is affecting this crucial region. Mapping Antarctica’s extremes is essential for understanding weather patterns, and teasing out natural climate variability from human-induced climate change, the WMO said in a statement. “Verification of maximum and minimum temperatures help us to build up a picture of the weather and climate in one of Earth’s final frontiers,” Michael Sparrow, a polar expert with the WMO-affiliated World Climate Research Programme, said in a statement.
For the entire Antarctic region — all land and ice below 60 degrees South latitude — the highest temperature recorded was 19.8 degrees Celsius (67.6 degrees Fahrenheit), on January 30, 1982, at a research station on Signy Island. For the continent itself, a maximum of 17.5 C (63.5 F) was recorded on March 24, 2015, near the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. Finally, the highest temperature for the Antarctic Plateau — at or above 2,500 metres (8,202 feet) was minus 7 C (19.4 F), on December 28, 1980, at a weather station. Getting a better grip on how global warming might impact the world's largest ice mass is of more than academic interest. Spanning an area twice the size of Australia, Antarctica’s ice sheet — up to 4.8 kilometres thick — contains 90 per cent of the world’s fresh water, enough to raise sea levels by about 60 metres were it to melt.
