Why are the poles warming faster than other places?

DW (English)

As climate change takes hold, average temperatures at the poles are rising 2-4x faster than other places – a phenomenon called ‘polar amplification’. Why?

Transcript

00:00Why are the polar regions warming up faster than anywhere else?

00:06The phenomenon is called polar amplification, and many different factors contribute to it.

00:13But three in particular are worth mentioning.

00:17The first involves what's called albedo.

00:20That's a measure of how reflective a surface is.

00:23White things like ice and snow are high albedo.

00:27They reflect most solar radiation back up into space.

00:32Dark surfaces like earth and water are low albedo.

00:36They absorb rays more readily and heat up.

00:39That can trigger a vicious cycle.

00:43When pack ice at the poles melts, it exposes the underlying ground or ocean.

00:49And they absorb more radiation, heating the surrounding environment more.

00:54That causes even more ice to melt, exposing yet more ground or water and so on.

01:00It's a feedback loop scientists say is happening at the poles.

01:05Second, more heat is being transported to the Arctic and Antarctic from the tropics.

01:13Because incoming sunlight strikes the equator more directly, it's warmer there than at the poles.

01:19As temperatures rise in the tropics due to climate change, ocean currents that absorb and distribute this heat are changing.

01:27And some of those changes seem to be accelerating ice pack melt off.

01:32Global wind patterns also move lots of heat from the tropics in a polar direction.

01:38Due to climate change, more and more hot moist air around the equator is rising in the atmosphere and being swept far to the north or south.

01:49And the water vapor in that hot moist air does something when it gets there.

01:54Gaseous H2O, water vapor, acts as a greenhouse gas.

01:59And air heated by climate change can hold a lot more of it.

02:03So, warming air contributes to more cloud formation, also at the poles.

02:08Because reflected radiation from the sun can get trapped between clouds and the ground, temperatures in that layer of air go up.

02:16Those factors and others are changing the poles dramatically.

02:21Satellite data shows that Antarctica is now losing upwards of 120 billion tons of ice per year on average.

02:29And the Arctic, which is heating up even faster, might be ice-free in summer by the mid-2030s.

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