Over the past week, heat waves blanketed the planet.
According to The Associated Press, parts of the northern part of the planet were warmer than average on Friday. On the other side of the planet, the Dome C research station registered a record temperature of about 70 degrees above average. The Vostok station, which is 2 miles high, registered a temperature of 0.1 degrees.
According to Robert Rodhe, lead scientist at the environmental data nonprofit Berkeley Earth, the heat wave in the southern part of the world was subsiding, but temperatures were still 50 degrees above normal.
Rodhe said that this event is rewriting record books and our expectations about what can happen in the frozen wasteland. No one knows.
The polar regions are in different seasons, with the polar regions emerging from the dark depths of winter in the north and the polar regions just starting to chill in the south. Their heat records are the same. The double-whammy polar heat wave was caused by the large amounts of water and warm air carried by the Atmospheric rivers.
A high-pressure system called a heat dome moved in and sat over the eastern side of the continent trapping heat and humidity, according to The Washington Post.
Are these two heat waves related? We don't know yet, and it's most likely a coincidence, wrote Dana Bergstrom, Sharon Robinson, and Simon Alexander in The Conversation on Tuesday.
Modelling suggests large-scale climate patterns are becoming more variable. This means the heat wave may be a sign of things to come under climate change.
It is possible that later studies will allow scientists to attribute warming events to climate change. The event that killed hundreds of people in the Pacific Northwest last June would have been impossible without human-caused climate change, according to a study published by World Weather Attribution.
Humans add more heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere and the poles are warming faster than the rest of the planet.
As the planet warms, periods of warmth in the winter are happening more frequently and lasting longer. It's difficult to contextualize the weather in Antarctica because of a lack of historical records.
The first precise temperature records start in the late 1950s, so it is hard to find out what is remarkable and what is not.
The data from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute shows that the coverage of the sea ice in the northern part of the planet dropped suddenly this month.
At the other pole, the sea ice coverage was at its lowest since records began, The Guardian reported in February.
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