Unprecedented Human-Caused Antarctic HeatWaves Driven by Polar Vortex and Atmospheric River Weirding

Ajouté : 2026-05-12

[00:00:03]Hello everybody.

[00:00:06]My name is Beckwith, Paul Beckwith.

[00:00:10]And couple videos ago, I talked all about Antarctic, what was happening in the oceans around Antarctic with circumpolar deep water upwelling and that warm warmer water coming up and undercutting the both the ice um that's on land but sitting on bedrock below sea level and the ice around the coastline of Antarctica so-c calledled fast ice and the ice shells and also on the Antarctic sea ice, how it's been upwelling warm water that has been undercutting the ice, causing record low levels of sea ice and increased glacier melt.

[00:00:58]So, in this video, I'm going to continue my detective work. And for that, I'm of course wearing my Sherlock Holmes hat.

[00:01:06]And I think it's backwards once again.

[00:01:09]It should be this way. Well, I don't know if that's quite right. Let's just put it here and, you know, halfway in between.

[00:01:18]So, there's been in the last number of years, there's been some unprecedented heat waves over the continent of Antarctica.

[00:01:29]What we've seen happen because of climate change disrupting the jet streams and the upper level winds in the stratosphere, the polar vortex, the Antarctica polar vortex was disrupted.

[00:01:45]And what happens when it's weakened and distorted? Then you can get atmospheric rivers bringing very warm temperatures and huge amounts of moisture from from lower latitudes up right over the continent of Antarctica towards the pole. So, I'm going to talk about a paper that was just published just over a week ago that talks about the unprecedented Antarctic heatwave that hit in the dead of winter um back in winter for Antarctica July and August 2024.

[00:02:27]And it caused temperatures as high as I looked at Earth Null School and I'll show you this data. temperatures reached as high as 4° C, plus 4° C, enough to melt the ice on the surface of Antarctica in the dead of winter. I mean, this is just mind-boggling when you think about it. And then I'll also show you data which is from earlier, a couple years earlier. So this was in March of 2022, which is the summer, you know, it's just past the peak of the summer months in Antarctica.

[00:03:07]And a whole section, almost the entire side, one side of Antarctica reached above zero temperatures for, you know, within about a week time span. So this was the Antarctica summer and temperatures from what I can see on Earth null school reached 13.5° C.

[00:03:31]So once again, so basically what we've done to this planet via climate change, we've completely disrupted the entire system such that the remotest, coldest continent, Antarctica, is now experiencing heat waves. This is a world that we live in today. And I'm going to show you the paper. It's a pre-print, so it hasn't gone through the peerreview process yet, but it was just published about a week ago and prompted me to do this video.

[00:04:06]So, let's get right into the data and have a look at what's been happening in Antarctica.

[00:04:13]And keep this in mind, you know, in the context of what's happening. I talked in detail like I say in the pre a previous video the next to last video about circumpolar deep water and then the last video of course is a little bit on what I'm doing with with my comedy which is ongoing and continuing as I'm honing honing my stuff but please watch the video where I had my debut at the comedy club the last video there's a link within the description to it okay so April 27th 2026, an unprecedented Antarctic heatwave hit in the dead of winter, what it signals for the decades ahead.

[00:04:57]And this is some of the data from the paper. And I'll show you the paper. So this is basically temperature anomalies across Antarctica. It's from late July to early August. And you can see, you know, this region here where temperatures, this is in degrees Celsius above normal. So we re reach temperatures over a large swath of Antarctica, much warmer than normal. And this is the wind patterns and the precipitation pattern. So there was heavy there was warm moist air flowing into East Antarctica here that helped drive the heat wave and caused um a lot of precipitation um in this particular region where where there was a heat wave.

[00:05:48]Okay. So what else does the article say?

[00:05:50]It says, "Well, in the middle of the Antarctic winter, during months of complete darkness, right, 24/7 darkness, temperatures often dip below minus30° C.

[00:06:03]The continent warmed dramatically. And in fact, it went above the melting point. It went I thought, you know, I'll show you in Earth nulls where it goes to plus 4° C in July and August 2024.

[00:06:18]Temperatures in parts of East Antarctica rose by up to 28 Celsius above average and they stayed high for more than two weeks. Okay, so this is this is a like this is the world we live in very climate is is going haywire very disruptive.

[00:06:36]So this is the a link to the study which I'll then which I'll show you. So Antarctic heatwave it's not just unusual weather. It was a rare atmospheric disturbance amplified by humancaused climate change and it offers a glimpse of what will become more common as we move forward. The journal the findings are in the journal NPJ climate and atmospheric science very reputable scientific journal.

[00:07:06]This is not an isolated event. It followed a heat wave in March 2022.

[00:07:12]Temperatures in some Antarctic areas soared 40 degrees Celsius above average.

[00:07:18]And I saw temperatures as high as 13.5° C. That's plus 13.5° C over Antarctica at this time. That's one of the largest temperature anomalies ever recorded anywhere on the planet. So, you know, a couple years ago, then the couple years before then, there's a clear signal here. Extreme warming is no longer confined to traditionally vulnerable regions. We're talking about Antarctica, heat waves in Antarctica.

[00:07:54]So, what happened in 2024, which is what the new paper studies, right? And it's just coming out now. It takes time to study these things. There was a weakening of the Antarctic polar vortex.

[00:08:06]So that's in the stratosphere, a band of strong winds high up in the atmosphere usually keeps cold air locked over the continent. But the vortex became distorted, weakened. It allowed unusual warming in the stratosphere.

[00:08:22]Temperatures rose by more than 15 Celsius in early July and then there was a surge in early August.

[00:08:30]So the a persistent high-pressure system developed over east Antarctica as a result. So there was that allowed a long narrow plume of warm moisture richch air known as an atmospheric river to move deep into the continent of Antarctica.

[00:08:50]This air mass transported heat and moisture from lower latitudes into the Antarctic interior.

[00:08:57]And this rarely happens in winter.

[00:09:00]Clouds associated with the system acted like a blanket, trapping heat near the surface and preventing it from escaping back into space.

[00:09:10]So instead of a brief spike of temperatures, the result was a prolonged and widespread heat wave over Antarctica.

[00:09:18]And of course at the same time, Antarctica sea ice was near record lows and the surrounding southern ocean was unusually warm. And I explained exactly why this happened in the next to last video that I did um you know the circumpolar deep water coming up.

[00:09:37]So we're seeing changes large scale atmospheric condition changes and the flow of heat into the continent causing these heat waves. So this is a clear warning signal from the coldest place on the earth. Natural variability helped trigger the heat wave, but it unfolded in a climate system already altered by human activity.

[00:10:02]So they sim they use computer simulations to compare today's climate with a world without human influence. So climate change made the 2024 heat wave stronger and more likely.

[00:10:16]Such extreme weather would have been exceptionally rare in the past, but today it's much more likely. could become up to 20 times more likely by the end of c of the century under high emission scenarios. You know, a heat wave in Antarctica may seem remote from everyday life. Like, how does it affect me? How does it affect you? But what happens in Antarctica doesn't just stay in Antarctica. I've usually said that. I came up with that quote for Arctic, but it also applies for the Antarctica. I came up with that quote many years ago, and you probably heard it. You know what happens in the Arctic doesn't stay in the Arctic. I've even done t-shirts with those those u phrases.

[00:10:58]Antarctica holds most of the world's fresh water locked in vast ice sheet. So even short-lived warming events can influence snowfall rates, surface melt, stability of floating ice shelves that hold back glaciers. When these ice shelves weaken, glaciers can accelerate into the ocean, contributing to sea level rise that affects coastlines worldwide. You may have seen news recently um where they've documented a tsunami in an Alaskan fjord when when you know the glacier withdrew, the ice shelf withdrew and got weakened and uh there was a landslide um resulting and it caused a tsunami um like 1,800 ft high or something like that in in the fjord. Um I might do a separate video on that.

[00:11:46]the the heat wave in 2024 and the one in 2022 in Antarctica show that climate change is transforming not just average temperatures but extreme temperatures.

[00:11:57]Atmospheric processes that have always existed can now have a far greater impact in a warmer world. So Antarctic heat waves matter. Even the most remote and coldest parts of the planet are being transformed rapidly by global warming. What happens here through rising seas and shifting climate patterns has consequences way beyond the poles. So, you know, you don't want greatly increased melt rates from Antarctica, which is where we're heading with all of all of these things, the warmer water around the heat waves within causing surface melt, you know, with very, very rapid melting and sea level rise. There was an article recently about how some people are saying New Orleans in Louisiana needs to start being evacuated. Um, and there was a paper about how sea level rise was has been greatly underestimated. So, I I should really cover those things in in future videos, but let's have a look.

[00:12:54]Um, I'm going to look at the paper here, which is uh you can download the PDF.

[00:13:00]I'll give you the link. Um, and this is the paper here. Um now there's uh you know it's an unedited version of the manuscript giving easy early access to the findings and it still has to go undergo further editing but it's released here unprecedented 2024 east antarctic winter heat wave driven by polar vortex weakening and amplified by anthropogenic warming. So I'll discuss some of the key features of the paper but I want to look at the data first.

[00:13:31]These are fig some figures that are in the paper. So I'll get back I'll come back to here. Let's look at Earth null school. Um so this is um back in uh this is July 21st 2024 and I started um I'm looking at um winds at the surface temperatures um you know you can click on here and see the temperatures minus 37 Celsius and so on. And let's just have a look.

[00:14:03]This is the uh so so you can see um the warm warmer air impinging here. It's not not as cold. You know, we're temperatures of minus 7.6 and you know there's minus4.5 there. Um you can see what the jetream patterns are doing.

[00:14:22]Very distorted, very wavy, um fractured and broken jet streams. Um but I as I cycle through um this is uh these are temp so this is minus 9.4 in this region and uh you know I go here um we're looking at some more data here um and if we just keep going you can see what's going on the temperatures here. Okay, this is uh I'm cycling. I'm looking at different timestamps, time frames. So, this is July 26, you know, it's one like so I found a region here. It's 1.3° C right up in here above zero just in a small area. And then I can go here and the the warmer air is coming deeper inside. Um, you know, I'm just looking at various data points.

[00:15:23]And then here, okay, uh, August 4th, 2024, you can see a green area above zero here. And I I if you go a little bit further, you can the area is expanded. And then I focused I I just zoomed out. And this is the area here.

[00:15:44]Green is above zero. And you can see I found a region that's four degrees Celsius plus four degrees Celsius on Antarctica.

[00:15:55]Um, and we're in the middle of the winter here. And you can look at how widespread this area is. The green is all above. So it's all above zero in this area. And you know, it's close to zero as you get near the fringes. The blues are slightly below zero. But you can see, you know, quite a large area is uh I I I saw temperatures. You can just click around. There's four degrees Celsius. Okay. So, this is just incredible that this would occur during the winter over the surface of the Antarctica continent. So, temperatures up, you know, 35 up to 40 degrees, well, about 30 at least 30 degrees Celsius warmer than normal. I think they say 28 but this looks like you know this it should normally be about minus30 in this region instead of that it's plus4 okay thanks to climate change yeah this is what humans have done people this is what the moisture is this is humidity relative humidity so very high relative humidity here um you know it's very when it's very cold the air can't hold much moisture but we've got reasonably high we've got pretty high humidity so it's to warm moist air from the atmospheric river coming in. Now, as bad as this is for this is in the winter, let's look let's go back a couple years earlier to 2022.

[00:17:26]And here's what you can see. Well, this is sorry, this is still 2024. Um, you know, as you go past the end to the end of August into September, you can see what's happening. Um, and you can just cycle through, you know, you can just use the back arrows or forward arrows to go back in time. Um, if you go if you click on this box, you can set in the date. So, I did that and I looked at what happened. I went back to to March 15, 2022. You can see some green appearing here. Temperatures above zero.

[00:18:01]Um, I went through a couple days and this is unbelievable. Look at this. So this is March 18, 2022. The green area is all above zero. Here we are in the continent of Antarctica and a vast chunk of the whole continent of Antarctica is above zero temperatures over the over the ice. And remember that you go up into high altitudes and it's still above zero. And here's 13.5° C above zero. This is the warmest I could find. And then if you go back so you can see when it started coming green here was January was was sorry March 15th and this was March 18th and you go to March 20th and there's a little bit of green left but but that tremendous heat above zero has has decreased and you can actually go through and cycle through. This is generally three-hour increments of cycling. You can see, you know, how well let's go back a little bit and back a bit more. Okay, so it's all below zero and then suddenly you get this above zero. It starts getting bigger and bigger the area. So I'm just cycling through and you can see boom, right? Vast areas and then as you keep going the temp the the above zero temperatures start to decline and uh vanish. So, so this is, you know, this is incredible. I mean, who would have thought that you would have this sort of situation over Antarctica, you know, reaching 13.5° C above normal. So, we've really thrown a monkey wrench into the global climate system. No place on Earth is unaffected, including the coldest, most remote Antarctica continent.

[00:20:02]Um yeah it's just it's just incredible mindboggling. So let's just see what it says a little bit about this paper some of the key points. um quite a you know interesting author list. I just like to notice um this is so it's mostly UK universities and then Wellington New Zealand couple authors Chile but if you look at the name of the authors these are of course these are traditional UK names of course right um right right so you know what what I'm just pointing out that more and more authors of scientific papers of importance are a lot of Chinese students go to various places around the world and they do a lot of research that is top-notch research. Just pointing that out. You know, as the US declines its scientific capability, the U the US is turning into a you know a superstitious fantasydriven nation. It's moving away from science all aspects of science including climate change. How can we call it? How can it still maintain a superpower status for much longer? I think it's already lost it. I think there's only one superpower emerging in the world and it's not the US. And I've talked about this in previous videos, but you know, just thought I'd put that in there. Um, so during July August 2024, East Antarctica experienced the most intense winter heat wave in the 46-year satellite era.

[00:21:47]Right? Remember seasons are inverted. So July, August is the peak of summer in the northern hemisphere. It's a peak of winter in the southern hemisphere. So this is in the middle of the winter, the coldest months of the year. East Antarctica, the coldest place part of Antarctica because of higher elevation, had the most intense winter heat wave we've seen yet. Regional mean surface temperatures exceeded the climacological mean by more than 9 Celsius for 17 consecutive days. That's over the whole area. And it so an unprecedented event and they tried to figure out what was going on with it. So they approached it from different methods. Um basically the results show there was a pronounced weakening of the stratospheric polar vortex and that enhanced that that basically opened up the air the the continent for meridol which is north south heat and moisture transport from an atmospheric river that that was accounted for about 50% of the observed surface warming and uh the so this was an exceptional winter heat wave. Um, and the likelihood of such events increased from well, you know, it's it's basically much more likely to occur today than it was without climate change. So, two to three times today, six times under moderate emissions, 26 times under high emissions. So, it's going to get more and more frequent. So human induced warming is changing even the coldest regions with implications for ice shelf stability and predictability of future Antarctic extremes.

[00:23:33]Okay, so it's just phenomenal. Now I just read a couple more lines. Of course, Antarctica plays a critical role in the global climate system and sea level regulation. The vast ice sheet store about 60% of the world's total fresh water in Antarctica. The East Antarctic ice sheet over which the heat wave occurred, holds the largest reservoir of glacial ice, the equivalent of 52 meters of global sea level rise if it completely melted. The East Antarctic ice sheet has been considered more stable than the West Antarctic ice sheet, which is grounded on bedrock below sea level. So when the you know the the huge warming temperatures around Antarctic they undercut a lot of the west Antarctic ice sheet the ice on the Antarctic peninsula also on Greenland ice sheets where the water impinges deep within Greenland you know in the areas under below sea level but the east Antarctic ice sheet is on bedrock above sea level but temp you know getting heat waves on top of it means that it melts from on top when it you know I mean Heat waves bring temperatures well above 0 degrees C.

[00:24:46]Okay, so the assumed stability of the East Antarctic ice sheets been challenged by record-breaking heat extremes in recent years, implying the region's susceptibility to rapid climate change. And you know in the early 21st century, so from 2000 to 2020, we've the east Antarctic ice sheets gained mass because there's been more frequent extreme snowfall events, right? So it's moistister, but it's still below zero, so there's more snowfall. Uh but in more recent years, uh that's starting to change. Um, the March 2022 heatwave was among the most striking examples of atmospheric warming over the region. Surface temperatures surged up to 40 degrees Celsius above the climatological norms. That's the largest temperature anomaly ever recorded in Antarctica. So, I showed you, you know, the March 2022 uh heat wave where, you know, the whole looks like almost the whole a third of the continent was above zero, you know, and we saw 13.5 Celsius. I mean, that was in what was that? That was in this image here. So, this was in um March of 2022.

[00:26:01]Okay. So, just phenomenal stuff is happening. And then they go into the details of of what's happening. So it's tied it was it's at the the stratospheric polar vortex weakening distorting atmospheric rivers intruding into the continent carrying heat and moisture from lower latitudes um and that heat being trapped uh for periods of time causing extensive and intense heat waves right over Antarctica. So there's a lot of details in this paper. Um but I'm not going to go through all those details. I'll just show you some figures. This so so this is the um wrong paper here. Um right here um and this so this is the um right here. Yeah. So this is in the same paper page 38. Um it shows different approaches, models, three attribution methods to figure out what was going on in the 2024 East Antarctic heatwave like a storyline circulation and probabil probabilistic studies. And then the figures are here. Um I've shown you this this you've seen already. This is uh this is 12 meter temperatures uh above the ground. Um the climatology uh the variation that was seen and this is the 90% like exceptionally the top 90%.

[00:27:40]So, so it's showing basically the top 10% of heat events and you can see when they're occurring. This is between jalty and August. So mostly in this region um and different patterns um wind speeds and uh different diagram showing you know the h molar pressure pressure over time um and uh what's this uh uh temperature over time gee I don't know um anyway you can look the details are all here I'm not going to dwell on all this I don't even see where G is right now off hand D uh G southern annular mode indexes of pressure anyway there's lots of data you can look at the details um on the data dynamic origins you know how the atmospheric river came in different story line different temperature anomalies and so on okay and some of the statistics ics on what happened versus what was expected. So so it's all in this paper. Um so in in summary, a couple videos ago I showed you how the warming of the oceans that and the warm water coming up from deeper levels to the surface has knocked out sea ice from 2015 onwards. the circumpolar deep water. You know, it's undercutting um uh vast ice which is attached to ant the Antarctic coastline. It's undercutting ice shelves um which are also undercut because there's more wave action because of less sea ice and that warm water is actually infiltrating deep under the ice in the continent melting basil ice melting the ice from below. And now I've shown you the other side where the atmospheric um patterns this the stratospheric polar vortex weakening lets warm air warm moist air from atmospheric rivers infiltrate far into the continent causing exceptional heat waves over large parts of Antarctica. And this happened in the winter of 2024.

[00:30:11]I guess this was the key image here, you know, above zero temperatures in the dead of winter 2024 and uh you know up to four degrees Celsius from what I could see. Although you can you know you can move an hour at a time you know and see if you can uh you know get get higher than that than what I saw you know that's just what I could see. And then um of course you know if we go to March 2022 you know this this is like look at this.

[00:30:45]I mean this is incredible warmth. It shrank a little bit. It's higher. It's growing a little bit more.

[00:30:54]I don't I there was a delay. It's smaller. Larger larger. Still moving an hour at a time. So 12.7 13.7 There you go.

[00:31:11]13.4.

[00:31:13]So you can just play around. Anyway, we got to 13.7. I had 13.5 before, you know, and you can, you know, it's just it's just phenomenal. I mean, what fraction of all of Antarctica is this is a temperature above zero, you know? It's like that's probably a that's at least a quarter maybe even a third of the whole continent above zero right which is going to be melting the ice especially temp it's not just above zero 13.7 degrees Celsius right balmy you know you can sunbathe out there in the middle of Antarctica in the summer right so it's just this is mind-boggling stuff um and uh you know Please, you know, share this video far and wide. Let people know what's happening in this part of the world and why it's important. So, every part of the planet is affected by abrupt climate system change. No part is left untouched.

[00:32:16]Very important paper, very important research. Thanks for listening. Please donate to my PayPal at paulbeckwith.net net to support my research and videos and please share this um information far and wide. Thanks again and for listening and bye for now.