Antarctica air temperature anomaly

A team of scientists from the University of Leeds in the UK and the Utrecht University in the Netherlands processed over 10,000 Copernicus Sentinel-1 radar images to measure the speed of 105 glaciers on the Peninsula’s west coast over a six-year period, from 2014 to 2021.

The paper published today in Nature Geoscience describes how they found that the glaciers experiencing the most seasonal change actually flow over 22% faster in summer than winter, with all glaciers in this region speeding up by 12% on average. This new discovery of faster summer ice speeds has not been seen before in this region of Antarctica.

While climate models of snow melt and ocean temperature were used to investigate what was driving this summer speedup, these maps of 2017 to 2022 show how air temperature over the whole of Antarctica has changed compared to the 1991–2020 average.

Read full story: Antarctic Peninsula glaciers on the run