The National Climate Center of the China Meteorological Administration recently announced that the mainland has just experienced a cold winter! In the winter of 2021/2022 (December 2021 to February 2022), the national average temperature is -3.2 degrees, which is 0.2 degrees lower than the same period of the year (-3.0 degrees) (Figure 1). Except for the temperature in northern Xinjiang, eastern Inner Mongolia, and the eastern and western parts of Shandong, the temperature in most parts of the country is close to the same period of the year or low, of which most of Tibet, central and southern Qinghai, most of Guangxi, central and eastern Heilongjiang and other places have a temperature of 1 to 4 degrees lower, and western Tibet is more than 4 degrees lower.
First, the Antarctic iceberg continues to break
But just as the continent has just experienced a cold winter, the southern hemisphere has recently been unusually hot, such as Argentina in South America, which has recently been plagued by high temperatures and fires. Even Antarctica's icebergs have seen some unusual changes recently – each Antarctic iceberg is unique when it drifts into the ocean, some drift thousands of kilometers in the Southern Ocean, then disintegrate and melt, and iceberg B-22A, which is even more special, in the past 20 years, only 100 kilometers away from the ice floes tongue of its birthplace, Thwaites Glacier.
Iceberg B-22 had just fallen off the ice shelf in March 2002
When the iceberg first spawned, the B-22 iceberg was 85 km long. It was 64 kilometers wide and subsequently collapsed, and the largest fragment was renamed B-22A. Twenty years later, the iceberg is still 71 kilometers × 45 kilometers in size, and in this 20-year period, it has not moved far because it was stuck or "stranded" in the Amundsen Sea on the edge of Antarctica. From the entire 2022 Antarctica summer, there has been a lot of sea ice in the area, but compared to March 2002, the ice in the area is mainly made up of broken sea ice and icebergs, rather than stronger ice shelves.
Iceberg B-22A on February 2, 2022
Studies have shown that stranded icebergs play an important role in stabilizing sea ice in the region and slowing the flow of the Thwaites Glacier to the sea. Although B-22A remains stranded, it continues to fracture and separate from the Eastern Thwaites Ice Shelf, and the iceberg itself continues to produce collapses to produce small debris, and the ice tongue extending from the Thwaites Glacier towards the sea retreats significantly. Ted Scambos, a senior scientist at the University of Colorado in the United States, said in 2020: "What this shows us is how glaciers fall apart at seams." ”
Second, Antarctic sea ice hit a record low
Even as the icebergs disintegrated, Antarctic sea ice fell to a new low in late February and early March, the lowest since satellite observations.
According to monitoring data from the National Ice and Snow Data Center, Antarctic sea ice has recently been at an all-time low. For example, on February 25, 2022, the Antarctic sea ice area was 1.924 million square kilometers, which is the first time since human satellite observations that antarctic sea ice area fell below the 2 million square kilometer mark, after a new historical low of 2.11 million square kilometers on March 3, 2017.
The new climate normal has arrived?
In the recent period, we have seen too many climate anomalies, such as Australia, just experienced the "once in a millennium" terrible rainstorm flood; for the mainland, this February is also unusually cold, many netizens complained that 3949 is not so cold, the Spring Festival is too cold to look like!
First of all, in the context of the twin peaks La Niña+ this year, the atmospheric circulation is prone to abnormalities; secondly, in the general trend of climate warming, extreme weather related to high temperature and precipitation will indeed increase. Another important factor is that the network is developed and the information is more circulating, which is also prone to this illusion. The growing attention of meteorological news can naturally spread more widely information that many people have not had the opportunity to know before. The earth's history is very long, and more extreme climates than the present are commonplace. But that doesn't mean we have to give up our vigilance, we advocate today to protect the environment, mitigate the risks of climate change, and save not the planet, but the humanity itself that emerged in a fleeting era.
#Weather##Blizzard##Heavy rains in Australia cause flooding##Antarctic##国际天气 #