- Article
- Published:
The quandary of detecting the signature of climate change in Antarctica
- Mathieu Casado ORCID:orcid.org/0000-0002-8185-415X1,
- Raphaël Hébert ORCID:orcid.org/0000-0002-9869-46582,
- Davide Faranda ORCID:orcid.org/0000-0001-5001-56981,3,4 &
- …
- Amaelle Landais ORCID:orcid.org/0000-0002-5620-54651
Nature Climate Changevolume 13, pages1082–1088 (2023)Cite this article
4318Accesses
38Citations
233Altmetric
Abstract
Global warming driven by human activities is expected to be accentuated in polar regions compared with the global average, an effect called polar amplification. Yet, for Antarctica, the amplitude of warming is still poorly constrained due to short weather observations and the large decadal climate variability. Using a compilation of 78 ice core records, we provide a high-resolution reconstruction of temperatures over the past 1,000 years for seven regions of Antarctica and direct evidence of Antarctic polar amplification at regional and continental scales. We also show that the amplitude of both natural and forced variability is not captured by the CMIP5 and six model ensemble members, which could be explained in part by the Southern Annular Mode. This shows that failing to consider the feedback loops causing polar amplification could lead to an underestimation of the magnitude of anthropogenic warming and its consequences in Antarctica.
This is a preview of subscription content,access via your institution
Access options
Access Nature and 54 other Nature Portfolio journals
Get Nature+, our best-value online-access subscription
9,800 Yen / 30 days
cancel any time
Subscription info for Japanese customers
We have a dedicated website for our Japanese customers. Please go tonatureasia.com to subscribe to this journal.
Buy this article
- Purchase on SpringerLink
- Instant access to the full article PDF.
¥ 4,980
Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout




Similar content being viewed by others
Data availability
The data used in this manuscript are available from the iso2k database31 and can be retrieved fromhttps://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/paleo-search/study/29593. The datasets (Temperature T2m and Total Precipitation) from ERA5 are readily available from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts servers athttps://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/datasets/reanalysis-datasets/era5. We used CMIP model outputs (Temperature fields), which are available athttps://esgf-node.ipsl.upmc.fr/projects/cmip6-ipsl/.
Code availability
The toolbox to calculate the persistence can be retrieved fromhttps://fr.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/95768-attractor-local-dimension-and-local-persistence-computation.
References
Abram, N. J. et al. Early onset of industrial-era warming across the oceans and continents.Nature536, 411–418 (2016).
Sippel, S., Meinshausen, N., Fischer, E. M., Székely, E. & Knutti, R. Climate change now detectable from any single day of weather at global scale.Nat. Clim. Change10, 35–41 (2020).
Masson-Delmotte, V. et al. InIPCC, 2021:Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2021).
Manabe, S. & Wetherald, R. T. The effects of doubling the CO2 concentration on the climate of a general circulation model.J. Atmos. Sci.32, 3–15 (1975).
Bekryaev, R. V., Polyakov, I. V. & Alexeev, V. A. Role of polar amplification in long-term surface air temperature variations and modern Arctic warming.J. Climate23, 3888–3906 (2010).
Rantanen, M. et al. The Arctic has warmed nearly four times faster than the globe since 1979.Commun. Earth Environ.3, 168 (2022).
Lazzara, M. A., Keller, L. M., Markle, T. & Gallagher, J. Fifty-year Amundsen–Scott South Pole station surface climatology.Atmos. Res.118, 240–259 (2012).
Clem, K. R. et al. Record warming at the South Pole during the past three decades.Nat. Clim. Change10, 762–770 (2020).
Gillett, N. P. et al. Attribution of polar warming to human influence.Nat. Geosci.1, 750–754 (2008).
Salzmann, M. The polar amplification asymmetry: role of Antarctic surface height.Earth Syst. Dyn.8, 323–336 (2017).
Hahn, L. C. et al. Antarctic elevation drives hemispheric asymmetry in polar lapse rate climatology and feedback.Geophys. Res. Lett.47, e2020GL088965 (2020).
Stenni, B. et al. Three-year monitoring of stable isotopes of precipitation at Concordia station, East Antarctica.Cryosphere10, 2415–2428 (2016).
Nicolas, J. P. & Bromwich, D. H. New reconstruction of Antarctic near-surface temperatures: multidecadal trends and reliability of global reanalyses.J. Climate27, 8070–8093 (2014).
England, M. R. Are multi-decadal fluctuations in Arctic and Antarctic surface temperatures a forced response to anthropogenic emissions or part of internal climate variability?Geophys. Res. Lett.48, e2020GL090631 (2021).
Jones, M. E. et al. Sixty years of widespread warming in the southern middle and high latitudes (1957–2016).J. Climate32, 6875–6898 (2019).
Armour, K. C., Marshall, J., Scott, J. R., Donohoe, A. & Newsom, E. R. Southern Ocean warming delayed by circumpolar upwelling and equatorward transport.Nat. Geosci.9, 549–554 (2016).
Jones, J. M. et al. Assessing recent trends in high-latitude Southern Hemisphere surface climate.Nat. Clim. Change6, 917–926 (2016).
Schneider, D. P. & Steig, E. J. Ice cores record significant 1940s Antarctic warmth related to tropical climate variability.Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA105, 12154–12158 (2008).
Dalaiden, Q., Schurer, A. P., Kirchmeier-Young, M. C., Goosse, H. & Hegerl, G. C. West Antarctic surface climate changes since the mid-20th century driven by anthropogenic forcing.Geophys. Res. Lett.49, e2022GL099543 (2022).
Steig, E. J. et al. Warming of the Antarctic ice-sheet surface since the 1957 International Geophysical Year.Nature457, 459–462 (2009).
Von Storch, H. et al. Reconstructing past climate from noisy data.Science306, 679–682 (2004).
Turner, J. et al. The SCAR READER project: toward a high-quality database of mean Antarctic meteorological observations.J. Climate17, 2890–2898 (2004).
Jouzel, J. & Masson-Delmotte, V. Paleoclimates: what do we learn from deep ice cores?Wiley Interdiscip. Rev. Clim. Change1, 654–669 (2010).
Jouzel, J. et al. Magnitude of isotope/temperature scaling for interpretation of central Antarctic ice cores.J. Geophys. Res. Atmos.108, 4361 (2003).
Klein, F. et al. Assessing the robustness of Antarctic temperature reconstructions over the past 2 millennia using pseudoproxy and data assimilation experiments.Clim. Past15, 661–684 (2019).
Casado, M. et al. Archival processes of the water stable isotope signal in East Antarctic ice cores.Cryosphere12, 1745–1766 (2018).
Laepple, T. et al. On the similarity and apparent cycles of isotopic variations in East Antarctic snow pits.Cryosphere12, 169–187 (2018).
Münch, T. & Laepple, T. What climate signal is contained in decadal- to centennial-scale isotope variations from Antarctic ice cores?Clim. Past14, 2053–2070 (2018).
Stenni, B. et al. Antarctic climate variability on regional and continental scales over the last 2000 years.Clim. Past13, 1609–1634 (2017).
Franzke, C. A novel method to test for significant trends in extreme values in serially dependent time series.Geophys. Res. Lett.40, 1391–1395 (2013).
Konecky, B. L. et al. The Iso2k database: a global compilation of paleo-δ18O and δ2H records to aid understanding of Common Era climate.Earth Syst. Sci. Data12, 2261–2288 (2020).
Goosse, H., Renssen, H., Timmermann, A. & Bradley, R. S. Internal and forced climate variability during the last millennium: a model-data comparison using ensemble simulations.Quat. Sci. Rev.24, 1345–1360 (2005).
Faranda, D., Freitas, J. M., Lucarini, V., Turchetti, G. & Vaienti, S. Extreme value statistics for dynamical systems with noise.Nonlinearity26, 2597–2622 (2013).
Faranda, D., Alvarez-Castro, M. C., Messori, G., Rodrigues, D. & Yiou, P. The hammam effect or how a warm ocean enhances large scale atmospheric predictability.Nature Commun.10, 1316 (2019).
Giamalaki, K. et al. Future intensification of extreme Aleutian low events and their climate impacts.Sci. Rep.11, 18395 (2021).
Rodionov, S. N. The problem of red noise in climate regime shift detection.Geophys. Res. Lett.31, L12707 (2006).
Lucarini, V. et al.Extremes and Recurrence in Dynamical Systems (John Wiley & Sons, 2016).
Huybers, P. & Curry, W. Links between annual, Milankovitch and continuum temperature variability.Nature441, 329–332 (2006).
Laepple, T. & Huybers, P. Ocean surface temperature variability: large model–data differences at decadal and longer periods.Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA111, 16682–16687 (2014).
Hébert, R., Herzschuh, U. & Laepple, T. Millennial-scale climate variability over land overprinted by ocean temperature fluctuations.Nature Geosci.15, 899–905 (2022).
Hébert, R. & Lovejoy, S. Regional climate sensitivity- and historical-based projections to 2100.Geophys. Res. Lett.45, 4248–4254 (2018).
Casado, M., Orsi, A. J. & Landais, A. On the limits of climate reconstruction from water stable isotopes in polar ice cores.Past Glob. Changes Mag.25, 146–147 (2017).
Casado, M., Münch, T. & Laepple, T. Climatic information archived in ice cores: impact of intermittency and diffusion on the recorded isotopic signal in Antarctica.Clim. Past16, 1581–1598 (2020).
Cox, P. M., Huntingford, C. & Williamson, M. S. Emergent constraint on equilibrium climate sensitivity from global temperature variability.Nature553, 319–322 (2018).
Schlund, M., Lauer, A., Gentine, P., Sherwood, S. C. & Eyring, V. Emergent constraints on equilibrium climate sensitivity in CMIP5: do they hold for CMIP6?Earth Syst. Dyn.11, 1233–1258 (2020).
Marshall, G. J., Fogt, R. L., Turner, J. & Clem, K. R. Can current reanalyses accurately portray changes in Southern Annular Mode structure prior to 1979?Clim. Dyn.59, 3717–3740 (2022).
Jouzel, J. et al. Validity of the temperature reconstruction from water isotopes in ice cores.J. Geophys. Res. Oceans102, 26471–26487 (1997).
Kino, K., Okazaki, A., Cauquoin, A. & Yoshimura, K. Contribution of the Southern Annular Mode to variations in water isotopes of daily precipitation at Dome Fuji, East Antarctica.J. Geophys. Res. Atmos.126, e2021JD035397 (2021).
Servettaz, A. P. M. et al. Snowfall and water stable isotope variability in East Antarctica controlled by warm synoptic events.J. Geophys. Res. Atmos.125, e2020JD032863 (2020).
Fogt, R. L. & Marshall, G. J. The Southern Annular Mode: variability, trends, and climate impacts across the Southern Hemisphere.Wiley Interdiscip. Rev. Clim. Change11, e652 (2020).
Fan, T., Deser, C. & Schneider, D. P. Recent Antarctic sea ice trends in the context of Southern Ocean surface climate variations since 1950.Geophys. Res. Lett.41, 2419–2426 (2014).
Steig, E. J. et al. Recent climate and ice-sheet changes in West Antarctica compared with the past 2,000 years.Nat. Geosci.6, 372–375 (2013).
Li, X. et al. Tropical teleconnection impacts on Antarctic climate changes.Nature Rev. Earth Environ.2, 680–698 (2021).
Lyu, K., Zhang, X., Church, J. A. & Hu, J. Evaluation of the interdecadal variability of sea surface temperature and sea level in the Pacific in CMIP3 and CMIP5 models.Int. J. Climatol.36, 3723–3740 (2016).
O’Reilly, C. H. et al. Projections of Northern Hemisphere extratropical climate underestimate internal variability and associated uncertainty.Commun. Earth Environ.2, 194 (2021).
Ellerhoff, B. et al. Contrasting state-dependent effects of natural forcing on global and local climate variability.Geophys. Res. Lett.49, e2022GL098335 (2022).
DeConto, R. M. & Pollard, D. Contribution of Antarctica to past and future sea-level rise.Nature531, 591–597 (2016).
Garbe, J., Albrecht, T., Levermann, A., Donges, J. F. & Winkelmann, R. The hysteresis of the Antarctic ice sheet.Nature585, 538–544 (2020).
Meinshausen, M. et al. The RCP greenhouse gas concentrations and their extensions from 1765 to 2300.Clim. Change109, 213 (2011).
Reschke, M., Kunz, T. & Laepple, T. Comparing methods for analysing time scale dependent correlations in irregularly sampled time series data.Comput. Geosci.123, 65–72 (2019).
Rohde, R. et al. Berkeley Earth temperature averaging process.Geoinfor. Geostat. Overview1, 2 (2013).
Osborn, T. J. & Briffa, K. R. The real color of climate change?Science306, 621–622 (2004).
Dansgaard, W. Stable isotopes in precipitation.Tellus16, 436–468 (1964).
Lorius, C., Merlivat, L. & Hagemann, R. Variation in the mean deuterium content of precipitations in Antarctica.J. Geophys. Res.74, 7027–7031 (1969).
Landais, A. et al. Surface studies of water isotopes in Antarctica for quantitative interpretation of deep ice core data.C. R. Geosci.349, 139–150 (2017).
Masson-Delmotte, V. et al. A review of Antarctic surface snow isotopic composition: observations, atmospheric circulation, and isotopic modeling.J. Climate21, 3359–3387 (2008).
Fujita, K. & Abe, O. Stable isotopes in daily precipitation at Dome Fuji, East Antarctica.Geophys. Res. Lett.33 L18503 (2006).
Landais, A., Ekaykin, A., Barkan, E., Winkler, R. & Luz, B. Seasonal variations of17O-excess and d-excess in snow precipitation at Vostok station, East Antarctica.J. Glaciol.58, 725–733 (2012).
Touzeau, A. et al. Acquisition of isotopic composition for surface snow in East Antarctica and the links to climatic parameters.Cryosphere10, 837–852 (2016).
Küttel, M., Steig, E. J., Ding, Q., Monaghan, A. J. & Battisti, D. S. Seasonal climate information preserved in West Antarctic ice core water isotopes: relationships to temperature, large-scale circulation, and sea ice.Clim. Dyn.39, 1841–1857 (2012).
Buizert, C. et al. Antarctic surface temperature and elevation during the Last Glacial Maximum.Science372, 1097–1101 (2021).
Guillevic, M. et al. Spatial gradients of temperature, accumulation and δ18O-ice in Greenland over a series of Dansgaard–Oeschger events.Clim. Past9, 1029–1051 (2013).
Christiansen, B. & Ljungqvist, F. C. Challenges and perspectives for large-scale temperature reconstructions of the past two millennia.Rev. Geophys.55, 40–96 (2017).
Freitas, A. C. M., Freitas, J. M. & Todd, M. Hitting time statistics and extreme value theory.Probab. Theory Relat. Fields147, 675–710 (2010).
Lucarini, V., Faranda, D. & Wouters, J. Universal behaviour of extreme value statistics for selected observables of dynamical systems.J. Stat. phys.147, 63–73 (2012).
Moloney, N. R., Faranda, D. & Sato, Y. An overview of the extremal index.Chaos29, 22101 (2019).
Süveges, M. Likelihood estimation of the extremal index.Extremes10, 41–55 (2007).
Acknowledgements
The investigations leading to these results have received funding from the DFG project CLIMAIC (M.C.). The SPACE ERC and GLACIAL LEGACY ERC projects have received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 716092 and no. 772852 for R.H.). The authors acknowledge fruitful discussions with T. Laepple, J. A. Caccavo, A. Orsi and C. Agosta. This manuscript was realized in the framework of the PAGES working group CVAS.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement, UMR 8212 CEA-CNRS-UVSQ, Université Paris-Saclay, IPSL, Gif-sur-Yvette, France
Mathieu Casado, Davide Faranda & Amaelle Landais
Alfred-Wegener-Institut, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, Potsdam, Germany
Raphaël Hébert
London Mathematical Laboratory, London, UK
Davide Faranda
LMD/IPSL, Ecole Normale Superieure, PSL Research University, Paris, France
Davide Faranda
- Mathieu Casado
Search author on:PubMed Google Scholar
- Raphaël Hébert
Search author on:PubMed Google Scholar
- Davide Faranda
Search author on:PubMed Google Scholar
- Amaelle Landais
Search author on:PubMed Google Scholar
Contributions
M.C. conceived the study and carried out the numerical surrogate data experiments. M.C. and D.F. applied the dynamical system theory to the system. M.C. and R.H. conceived the statistical and spectral approaches. M.C. led the redaction of the manuscript with the help of R.H. All the authors discussed the results and contributed to the manuscript.
Corresponding author
Correspondence toMathieu Casado.
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Peer review
Peer review information
Nature Climate Change thanks the anonymous reviewers for their contribution to the peer review of this work.
Additional information
Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Extended data
Extended Data Fig. 1 Impact of window length on trend estimates.
Iso2k stack for all of Antarctica (black), CPS reconstruction from Stenni et al,29, and for an ensemble of 50 surrogate data simulated for realistic conditions in Antarctica (decadal natural variability of 0.6 ‰2.yr, a beta of 0.6, and an amplitude of the anthropogenic warming of 0.1 ‰/dec starting 50 years prior to the end of the window over which the trend is calculated, see Supplementary SectionsS2 andS3, dark green line), as well as confidence interval for an average of 50 cores calculated from 10 000 iterations (green shading).
Extended Data Fig. 2 Simulation of the trend impact on the persistence on surrogate data without any natural variability.
change of persistence (Θ, top),δ18O (middle), and 40-year running trend (bottom) as observed in the Iso2k stack (grey individual datapoints, black, 40-year block average) and for 4 different hypotheses on the intensity of the climatic change induced trend (from 0.05°C/dec to 0.3°C/dec, Δδ18O ≈ 0.5 × ΔT).
Extended Data Fig. 3 Simulation of the trend impact on the persistence on surrogate data with natural variability.
change of persistence (Θ, top),δ18O (middle), and 40-year running trend (bottom) as observed in the Iso2k stack (grey individual datapoints, black, 40-year block average) and for 4 different hypotheses on the intensity of the climatic change induced trend (from 0.05°C/dec to 0.3°C/dec, Δδ18O ≈ 0.5 × ΔT) with natural variability with aβ of 0.6 and an average power at the decadal scale (10 - 40 years band) of 0.52 ‰2/y.
Extended Data Fig. 4 Simulation of the natural variability and trend impact on the persistence on surrogate data.
change of persistence (Θ, top),δ18O (middle), and 40-year running trend (bottom) as observed in the Iso2k stack (grey individual datapoints, black, 40-year block average) and for 4 different hypotheses on the intensity of the power of the natural variability with aβ of 0.6 and average powers at the decadal scale (10 - 40 years band) ranging from 0.3 to 2.2 °C2/yr. The climate change induced trend is set to 0.2°C/dec (Δδ18O ≈ 0.5 × ΔT).
Extended Data Fig. 5 Probability to obtain a given number of decades where Θ out of the range of values observed in the last 1000 years.
Monte-Carlo analysis of the probability to obtain a given number of times whenθ is above the confidence interval presented in Fig.2 (1 std on the whole time series) for a period of a 100 years using 10 000 iterations on the dataset.
Extended Data Fig. 6 Regional last 1000 years reconstructions.
a) Antarctic Peninsula, b) Weddell Coast, c) Dronning Maud Land Coast, d) West Antarctica, e) map of the different regions, the black dots represent the station locations, f) East Antarctic Plateau, g) All of Antarctica, h) Victoria Land, and i) Indian Coast. For each panel, from top to bottom, time series of the persistence metric (Θ, y), isotopic composition anomaly stack for all ice cores in Antarctica (inδ18O units ‰), compared to the previous stack realised by Stenni et al.29 (purple: CPS stack, yellow, unweighted stack, ‰), trend on 40-year running windows ending on the given year with confidence intervals, and number of records covering a given time period,. For Θ andδ18O, light curves are the original data with annual resolution, thick curves are 10-year block averages. Note that the block averages and the trend estimates do not take into account datapoints after 2008 when the number of available cores drop below 10. For the top panel, the horizontal solid line represents the average value, while the horizontal dashed line is the average value +1 std.
Extended Data Fig. 7 Spectral constraint of the isotope-temperature calibration.
Power spectral density of the reconstructed temperature for different values of Δδ18O/ΔT between 1920 and 1990 compared to the spectrum of the ERA5 reanalysis outputs for the core location between 1951 and 2020 (the non-overlapping windows are set up to obtain the same length of time series with the largest number of cores; the results are insensitive to the window choice). The dip in ERA5 for timescales around 15 years is also found in the weather station observations and could be link to the SAM influence but was not taken into account for the sake of the calibration.
Supplementary information
Supplementary Information
Supplementary Sections 1–11, Figs. 1–9, Tables 1–7 and references 1–52.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Casado, M., Hébert, R., Faranda, D.et al. The quandary of detecting the signature of climate change in Antarctica.Nat. Clim. Chang.13, 1082–1088 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-023-01791-5
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Version of record:
Issue date:
Share this article
Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:
Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.
Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative
This article is cited by
A framework for assessing global health impacts of polar change: An urgent call for interdisciplinary research
- Netra Naik
- Karol Bot
- Joacim Rocklöv
Ambio (2026)
Dynamical reconstruction of Southern Ocean and Antarctic climate variability since 1700
- Quentin Dalaiden
- Hugues Goosse
- Antoine Barthelemy
Scientific Data (2025)
The Greenlandification of Antarctica
- Ruth Mottram
- Nicolaj Hansen
- Benjamin J. Wallis
Nature Geoscience (2025)
Recent increase in the surface mass balance in central East Antarctica is unprecedented for the last 2000 years
- Alexey A. Ekaykin
- Arina N. Veres
- Yetang Wang
Communications Earth & Environment (2024)


