New studies show cooling and ice-sheet thickening in Antarctica.

• Author: Larson, Vanessa
• Position: Environmental Intelligence

A new study published in the journal Nature reports that Antarctica's overall climate is cooling, with the most distinct temperature decrease occurring in the summer. The report shows that temperatures in Antarctica's McMurdo Dry Valleys dropped by 0.7 degrees C per decade between 1986 and 2000, a drop that is part of a net cooling in Antarctica since 1966. While other studies have reported warming in Antarctica, University of Illinois at Chicago researcher Peter Doran, the report's lead author, said this was because they relied too heavily on data from the northward reaching Antarctic Peninsula, which "has been warming drastically." In contrast, he said, "our data suggest that in the last 35 years, more areas on the continent have cooled than warmed."

Although these new findings may seem contrary to expectations about the effects of global warming on the Earth's poles, they do not indicate a reversal of global warming on a worldwide scale, as some media sources incorrectly reported. Antarctic temperature data are in fact included in the global calculations made by U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which released a report in 2001 showing that the Earth's average surface temperature increased by 0.6 degrees C during the twentieth century (and by about 0.15 degrees C per decade since 1979). Doran concurred that "global warming is real and...