The penguins in Dubai’s Mall of the Emirates are currently enjoying colder temperatures than their Antarctic cousins.
For the first time, Antarctica recorded temperatures of over 20 degrees Celsius earlier this week. Dubai and the UAE also saw its temperatures drop, due to strong northwestern polar winds, sending temperatures plummeting below 18 degrees.
That makes the UAE officially colder than Antarctica.
Temperatures were recorded from an Argentine research base in the North of the Antarctic Peninsula.
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has said it is currently verifying the temperatures, however they point to a disturbing trend – that the melting of the world’s largest ice repository is currently speeding up.
While regular temperatures on the southern continent vary from -10 degrees to -60 degrees Celsius, Antarctica’s northern tip is one of the fastest-warming places on the planet. Temperatures have risen there by almost 3 degrees over the last 50 years.
The amount of ice lost over the last 40-years has increased at six times its normal speed.
“We are seeing the warming trend in many of the sites we are monitoring, but we have never seen anything like this,” said Carlos Schaefer, who works on a Brazilian government project that tracks the effect of climate change in the Arctic.
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