Rain in Antarctica isn’t just a sign of climate change. It’s also part of a feedback loop that accelerates global warming.
Climate change is bringing a new threat to penguins that live on the Antarctic peninsula on the western side of the continent. It's the second-fastest warming part of the icy landmass, where it already rains an average of 50 days every year.
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But French scientists project by the end of this century, that will more than triple.
Rain makes glaciers break off, or “calve,” more easily by weakening the ice — not unlike how it weakens the defenses of some penguins.
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"The chicks, they have really fluffy coats with a lot of down feathers, so they are protected from the cold, but they are not as waterproof as the adult feathers," said Julia Finger, an ornithologist at . "So when you have rain and then they get soaked, and then we have cold afterwards … we have higher chick mortality."
Finger is the resident bird expert for HX Expeditions, an organization that takes travelers on a tour of some of the world's most remote places. Onboard, she and her fellow scientists explain the impacts of climate change.
Penguins feel it directly, but soon we will, too. Rain in Antarctica makes the entire planet hotter.
NASA satellites have tracked how rain replaces snow and ice with vegetation and found that since the late 1980’s, there are 14 times more Antarctic land that’s green instead of white.
"[Rain] is contributing to warming as well, or to not reflecting as much energy as the white continent has done so far," said Verena Meraldi, a chief scientist at HX. "Changing something in the equation will lead to a different result on the other end."
Additionally, British scientists recently found that it may now even be raining in Antarctica in the winter. They warn that will have devastating consequences rippling well beyond the land of penguins by raising global sea levels.
One-hundred and twenty-nine million Americans live along the United States' coasts — and increasingly, even when it’s not raining, the oceans are spilling onto coastal streets on the sunniest of days.
