Respond to prefers-color-scheme dark in app web views

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

The Capitals, a team in transition, know what they want this offseason

Is Pastis as good as our food critic thought? He sent spies to find out.

Nationals can’t solve Nate Eovaldi, drop series finale to Rangers

An I bond is now at 4.28 percent. Are they still a good deal?

Use these 6 points to say no to a college you and your kid can’t afford

How this new rule protects retirement savers from costly advice

Israel’s offensive is destroying Gaza’s ability to grow its own food

Riot police and over 2,000 arrests: A look at 2 weeks of campus protests

‘It’s been abused’ Rep. McCaul on motion to vacate threat

Biden honors distinguished Americans; Trump back in N.Y. court

Hope Hicks witnessed nearly every Trump scandal. Now she must testify.

State laws measure if a woman is close enough to death for an abortion

On Press Freedom Day, little to celebrate for Hong Kong’s journalists

Young Georgians want to be part of Europe. Their government is in the way.

Taxes are inevitable. Paying to prepare them doesn’t have to be.

Teen grabs wheel when driver passes out and school bus veers into traffic

Cat climbed into Amazon return box, found alive 630 miles away

Brave Little Hunter is free: Baby orca escapes lagoon for open seas

Trump Media auditor charged by SEC with ‘massive fraud’

Google’s empire is massive. A judge will soon rule if it’s a monopoly.

Journalism in India is under assault

The dangerous new call for regime change in Beijing

Ukrainian men abroad voice anger over pressure to return home to fight 

Ask Amy: Should I be the best man if I think the bride is abusive?

Carolyn Hax: Husband keeps pushing modest spouse to wear sexier clothes

Miss Manners: Host eats luxurious breakfast, leaves cereal for guest

The New York Times, alone in its outrage over access to Biden

Wait, what is Stephen A. Smith talking about? Find out with our quiz.

Stephen A. Smith would like even more of your attention

What’s the best bus to New York? We tested 5 for comfort and value.

You asked: Do I need a passport for my cruise?

Adaptive equipment is making national parks more inclusive

Reporting on Earth’s changing climate and the search for solutions

See more coverage in your recommendations

Climate & environment

The Climate Coach newsletter

Climate alerts

The coldest location on the planet has experienced an episode of warm weather this week unlike any ever observed, with temperatures over the eastern Antarctic ice sheet soaring 50 to 90 degrees above normal. The warmth has smashed records and shocked scientists.

“This event is completely unprecedented and upended our expectations about the Antarctic climate system,” said Jonathan Wille, a researcher studying polar meteorology at Université Grenoble Alpes in France, in an email.

“Antarctic climatology has been rewritten,” <a href="https://twitter.com/pinturicchio_60/status/1504720715647442952" target=_blank>tweeted</a> Stefano Di Battista, a researcher who has published studies on Antarctic temperatures. He added that such temperature anomalies would have been considered “impossible” and “<a href="https://twitter.com/pinturicchio_60/status/1504445209647669250" target=_blank>unthinkable</a>” before they actually occurred.

Parts of eastern Antarctica have seen temperatures hover 70 degrees (40 Celsius) above normal for three days and counting, Wille said. He likened the event to the June heat wave in the Pacific Northwest, which scientists concluded would have been <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/07/07/pacific-northwest-heat-wave-climate/" target=_blank>“virtually impossible” without human-caused climate change.</a>

Record heat wave in Antarctica brought exceptional snow, rain and melting

What is considered “warm” over the frozen, barren confines of eastern Antarctica is, of course, relative. Instead of temperatures being minus-50 or minus-60 degrees (minus-45 or minus-51 Celsius), they’ve been closer to zero or 10 degrees (minus-18 Celsius or minus-12 Celsius) — but that’s a massive heat wave by Antarctic standards.

The average high temperature in Vostok — at the center of the eastern ice sheet — is around minus-63 (minus-53 Celsius) in March. But on Friday, the temperature leaped to zero (minus-17.7 Celsius), the warmest it’s been there during March since record keeping began 65 years ago. It broke the previous monthly record by a staggering 27 degrees (15 Celsius).

“In about 65 record years in Vostok, between March and October, values ​​above -30°C were never observed,” wrote Di Battista in an email.

Sea ice over Antarctica just shrank to its smallest on record

Vostok, a Russian meteorological observatory, is about 808 miles from the South Pole and sits 11,444 feet above sea level. It’s famous for holding the <a href="https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2009JD012104#:~:text=%5B1%5D%20The%20lowest%20recorded%20air,UT%20on%2021%20July%201983." target=_blank>lowest temperature ever observed on Earth</a>: minus-128.6 degrees (minus-89.2 Celsius), set on July 21, 1983.

Temperatures running at least 50 degrees (32 Celsius) above normal have expanded over vast portions of eastern Antarctica from the Adélie Coast through much of the eastern ice sheet’s interior. Some computer model simulations and <a href="https://twitter.com/ItaliAntartide/status/1504813216634966020" target=_blank>observations</a> suggest temperatures may have even climbed up to 90 degrees (50 Celsius) above normal in a few areas.

Eastern Antarctica’s Concordia research station, operated by France and Italy and about 350 miles from Vostok, climbed to 10 degrees (minus-12.2 Celsius), its <a href="https://twitter.com/pinturicchio_60/status/1504720715647442952">highest temperature on record</a> for any month of the year. Average high temperatures in March are around minus-56 (minus-48.7 Celsius).

At a nearby weather station, the temperature reached 13.6 degrees (minus-10.2 Celsius) about 67 degrees (37 Celsius) above average, according to University of Wisconsin Antarctic researchers Linda Keller and Matt Lazzara.

Keller and Lazzara said in an email that such a high temperature is particularly noteworthy since March marks the beginning of autumn in Antarctica, rather than January, when there is more sunlight. At this time of year, Antarctica is losing about 25 minutes of sunlight each day.

Wille said the warm conditions over Antarctica were spurred by an extreme atmospheric river, or a narrow corridor of water vapor in the sky, on its east coast. According to computer models, the atmospheric river made landfall on Tuesday between the Dumont d’Urville and Casey Stations and dropped an intense amount of rainfall, potentially causing a significant melt event in the area.

The moisture from the storm diffused and spread over the interior of the continent. However, a strong blocking high pressure system or “heat dome,” moved in over east Antarctica, preventing the moisture from escaping. The heat dome was exceptionally intense, five standard deviations above normal.

The excessive moisture from the atmospheric river was able to retain large amounts of heat, while the liquid-rich clouds radiated the heat down to the surface — known as downward long-wave radiation.

Wille explained warm air is often transported over the Antarctic interior this way but not to this extent or intensity. “[T]his is not something we’ve seen before,” he said. “This moisture is the reason why the temperatures have gotten just so high.”

Models show the atmospheric river will exit the continent around Saturday, but the moisture will take longer to dissipate. Abnormally high temperatures in the region could last through the weekend.

The abnormally high temperatures have caused some melting in the region according to models, which is unusual as this part of Antarctica doesn’t experience much melt often. This one melt event won’t affect the stability of the glaciers in that area though.

“This event happened in a location that doesn’t often have melt. Obviously, this doesn’t mean that from now on we’re worried that melting will happen,” Wille said. “It’s more of like, ‘Oh, that is weird, that could happen more in the future and then this could be bad.’”

Wille said it’s difficult to attribute this one event to climate change at the moment, but he does think rising temperatures helped prime conditions for such an event. Climate change is “loading the dice” for more situations like this, he said.

Wille and his colleagues are studying how climate change will affect the circulation patterns around Antarctica and whether atmospheric rivers will become more common or more intense.

“We do believe they will become more intense because it just simple physics … but the details, we’re still trying to figure that out. It would be very difficult to say that there’s not a climate change fingerprint on an event like this,” he said.

Keller and Lazzara suggested more study is needed on the climate change connection.

“[W]e can’t tell whether this is going to be a new trend or is just an oddity that occurs occasionally on a most fascinating continent,” they wrote.

Temperatures are known to vary wildly over Antarctica, and massive swings are common. Contrasting with this warm spell over eastern Antarctica, the South Pole observed just observed its coldest April to September period on record last year, with an average temperature of minus-78 degrees (minus-61 Celsius).

South Pole posts most severe cold season on record, a surprise in a warming world

But shortly after that historic bout of cold, the sea ice extent surrounding the continent <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2022/03/18/antarctica-sea-ice-record-low/" target=_blank>shrunk to its smallest extent just last month</a>.

Amid all of the variability in Antarctica, fingerprints of human-caused climate change are still evident. Its western ice sheet is losing mass while western parts of the continent and the peninsula are among the fastest-warming regions on Earth.

Warm ocean temperatures <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/12/13/thwaites-glacier-melt-antarctica/?itid=lk_inline_manual_32">threaten to destabilize</a> Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier, a slab the size of Florida that contributes about 4 percent of annual global sea level rise.

The historically high temperatures in Antarctica follow a pulse of exceptional warmth on the planet’s opposite end. On Wednesday, temperatures near the North Pole catapulted 50 degrees above normal, close to the melting point.

Record ‘bomb cyclone’ brings exceptional warmth to North Pole

National Weather Association, Digital Seal of Approval

University of Virginia, BA in environmental science, 1998

University of Wisconsin, MS in atmospheric science, 2000

Jason Samenow is The Washington Post’s weather editor and Capital Weather Gang's chief meteorologist. He earned a master's degree in atmospheric science and spent 10 years as a climate change science analyst for the U.S. government. He holds the Digital Seal of Approval from the National Weather Association.

Jason Samenow

Wake Forest University, BS in Chemistry

Boston University, MS in Science Journalism

Kasha Patel writes the weekly Hidden Planet column, which covers scientific topics related to Earth, from our inner core to space storms aimed at our planet. She also covers weather, climate and environment news.

Kasha Patel

Eastern Antarctica sees record temperatures 70 degrees above normal

Average Year-To-Date	1
Yearly Average	40
Record Most	67 (1980,2010)
Record Fewest	7 (1886,1905)
Last Year	38