Scientists describe 20.75C logged at Seymour Island as ‘incredible and abnormal’.

The Antarctic has registered a temperature of more than 20C (68F) for the first time on record, prompting fears of climate instability in the world’s greatest repository of ice.

The 20.75C logged by Brazilian scientists at Seymour Island on 9 February was almost a full degree higher than the previous record of 19.8C, taken on Signy Island in January 1982.

It follows another recent temperature record: on 6 February an Argentinian research station at Esperanza measured 18.3C, which was the highest reading on the continental Antarctic peninsula.

These records will need to be confirmed by the World Meteorological Organization, but they are consistent with a broader trend on the peninsula and nearby islands, which have warmed by almost 3C since the pre-industrial era – one of the fastest rates on the planet.

Scientists, who collect the data from remote monitoring stations every three days, described the new record as “incredible and abnormal”.

“We are seeing the warming trend in many of the sites we are monitoring, but we have never seen anything like this,” said Carlos Schaefer, who works on Terrantar, a Brazilian government project that monitors the impact of climate change on permafrost and biology at 23 sites in the Antarctic.

Schaefer said the temperature of the peninsula, the South Shetland Islands and the James Ross archipelago, which Seymour is part of, has been erratic over the past 20 years. After cooling in the first decade of this century, it has warmed rapidly.

Scientists on the Brazilian antarctic programme say this appears to be influenced by shifts in ocean currents and El Niño events: “We have climatic changes in the atmosphere, which is closely related to changes in permafrost and the ocean. The whole thing is very interrelated.”

The impacts vary across Antarctica, which encompasses the land, islands and ocean south of 60 degrees latitude. This region stores about 70% of the world’s fresh water in the form of snow and ice. If it were all to melt, sea levels would rise by 50 to 60 metres, but that will take many generations. UN scientists predict oceans will be between 30cm and 110cm higher by the end of this century, depending on human efforts to reduce emissions and the sensitivity of ice sheets.

Read more from the original Article  by Jonathan Watts from this link:  The Guardian