14 DAY TRIAL // Following decades of ongoing studies, climate researchers have discovered a very peculiar link between the southwestern corner of Australia and a region of eastern Antarctica. It would appear that a negative correlation exists between them, in the sense that, when the Australian land is battered with drought and lack of precipitations, its Antarctic counterpart is plagued with severe snowfall. The same investigation also revealed that human activities might be playing a role in making this connection even stronger, ScienceNow reports.
The new conclusions were drawn after experts analyzed more than 30 years' worth of ice-core sample data from the Law Dome ice field, near Cape Poinsett, in Antarctica. The area lies South of the Australian southwest, and researchers noticed that it had been battered by significant snowfall over the last three decades. When looking at its northern counterpart, the investigators determined that the corresponding region in Australia had been plagued by droughts for roughly the same amount of time. Such a connection is very curious, they say.
Following this lead, climate experts Tas van Ommen and Vin Morgan, both based at the Australian Antarctic Division, in Tasmania, looked at ice-core sample records stretching back more than 750 years. They determined that, in 40 percent of the cases where variations existed in the Australian territory, they were mirrored in Antarctica as well. This research also took into account the meteorological records, precipitation patterns, and Southern Hemisphere atmospheric circulation patters that might have been affecting southwestern Australia at the same time.
“The connection really stood out,” van Ommen says of the findings. The team published the result of their investigation in the latest online issue of the esteemed scientific journal Nature Geoscience. It was additionally discovered that the patterns of associations appeared to have increased over the past few decades. According to the expert, this correlation is “so unusual that we believe it lies outside the range of natural variation,” which is an elegant way of saying that human activities may have played an important part here. “The implication is that the drought [in southwest Australia] could be similarly unusual,” he concludes.