A record heat wave has baked Europe for several days. The temperature in Paris hit 107°F. That crushed a record that was 70 years old. Wave after wave of record temperatures has swept over both the United States and Europe, which has made it the hottest July in history.
A very few parts of the world have temperatures that have been well below zero since they were first visited in the early 20th century. Among the coldest regularly is Ago-4 in Antarctica, where it is minus 88°F today.
Argo-4 is fundamentally no more than a weather station. No one lives there, or could. The reason the area is so cold is not just its location near one of the Antarctic long ice shelves. It is nearly 12,000 feet above sea level, which presses temperatures even lower.
The Ago weather stations are only monitored by satellites. This is part of a system put together by the National Science Foundation Office of Polar Programs. There are five of these locations active now. According to the PolarTREC, “These remote observatories house nearly identical instrumentation that measure atmospheric weather conditions at the poles. This includes the Earth’s magnetic forces, aurora activity, and the influence of phenomena in space weather.”
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These five stations are all on the Antarctic Plateau. It is a region is East Antarctica, The area includes the geographic South Pole. This section of the continent was discovered early in Antarctic exploration. In 1909, Ernest Shackleton crossed it as part of his Nimrod Expedition. East Antarctica has among the most hostile environments on earth.
Even this coldest part of the world is starting to melt due to global warming. A Yale Environment study of the area found that “It’s hard to decipher what exactly is taking place on a gigantic continent of ice with just a few decades of satellite data and limited actual measurements of things like snowfall and ocean temperatures. But according to one controversial paper released earlier this year, East Antarctica is now, in fact, shrinking, and is already responsible for 20 percent of the continent’s ice loss.” Even if the rate at which is ice is melting is a matter of debate, that it is melting is backed by a consensus among climate scientists.
Ago-4 may remain one of the coldest places in the world. However, there is a strong case that it is getting warmer.
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