“I have not seen this happen so quickly in Antarctica,” Maury Pelto, a glaciologist at Nichols College in Massachusetts, said Friday in a NASA post.
Eagle Island is located near the Argentine research base Esperanza, where the highest temperature was recorded on February 6.
A committee of the World Meteorological Organization is working to verify record temperatures, but the warm period results are easy to spot on satellite imagery. The heatwave melted about 20% of the seasonal snow accumulation on Eagle Island over several days.
Sources: Photo: Joshua Stevens / Landsat data from the USGS / GEOS-5 data / NASA GSFC
