"It's important to hear the latest science," said Hilary Benn, Britain's environment minister. "I was impressed that they're finding temperatures rising. But there is still so much not known."
Representatives from more than a dozen nations, including the United States, China, and Russia, rendezvoused at this Norwegian research station with the scientists completing the last leg of a 1,400-mile, two-month trek over the ice from the South Pole.
The 12-member Norwegian-American Scientific Traverse of East Antarctica was a leading project in the 2007-2009 International Polar Year. It is a mobilization of 10,000 scientists and 40,000 others from more than 60 countries engaged in intense Arctic and Antarctic research over the past two Southern summer seasons, on the ice, at sea, via icebreaker, submarine and surveillance satellite.
Learning more about historic temperature trends has been a prime concern in examining whether global warming, already occurring elsewhere on the planet, might cause Antarctica's huge store of ice to start melting, raising sea levels, potentially to a disastrous point for coastal cities and shorelines worldwide.
Speaking to the environment ministers over breakfast, Kim Holmen, research director for the Norwegian Polar Institute, the Troll station's operator, noted that scientists had generally thought Antarctica as a whole was not warming in recent decades. But a recent study in the journal Nature shook that view.
"This new analysis shows us actually the whole of Antarctica has been warming," Holmen said.
The preliminary finding from the on-the-ground Traverse expedition, if it is confirmed, would reinforce that Nature study, which extrapolated temperature trends by blending satellite information with scarce weather-station data available in and around Antarctica.
By drilling cores into the annual layers of ice sheet in this little-explored region, the trekkers from the South Pole were also gathering data on how much snow has fallen historically.
