Engineering
Antarctica has been experiencing some extremely weird weather and scientists are starting to get worried. There's an area on the west side of the icy continent called the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and last January, scientists found a 300,000-square-mile portion of its perimeter was melting. That's an area roughly two times the size of California, covered in slush. According to recent research published in Nature Communications, the melt was caused by an unusually strong El Niño event around January 2016.
El Niño is a weather event that brings unusually warm water in the Pacific Ocean, and one of the big takeaways from the research is that this strong El Niño in 2016 directly contributed to the unusually widespread Antarctic ice melt.
For more than two weeks in January 2016, a passive microwave satellite observed surface ice melt two times the size of California.
What do scientists predict for the future if this type of weather continues?
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