Antarctica Melts Under Its Hottest Days on Record

On Feb. 6, 2020, weather stations recorded the hottest temperature on record for Antarctica.
Thermometers at the Esperanza Base on the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula reached 18.3°C (64.9°F) — around the same temperature as Los Angeles that day. The warm spell caused widespread melting on nearby glaciers.

The warm temperatures arrived on Feb. 5 and continued until Feb. 13, 2020. The image above shows melting on the ice cap of Eagle Island and was acquired by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 on Feb. 13, 2020.

Credit: NASA Earth Observatory images by Joshua Stevens, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey and GEOS-5 data from the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Larger image