One of the most rapidly warming places on Earth in the past half century actually cooled in the past 20 years.
Temperatures on the Antarctic Peninsula have reversed course, dropping by an average of about 0.5 degree Celsius per decade since the late 1990s while the rest of the world experienced record heat, 10 researchers from the British Antarctic Survey concluded in an article published in the journal Nature.
The report's authors didn't make a conclusion about what their findings mean for the debate about global warming, saying the changes they noticed could fit at the extreme end of natural climate variations. That suggests it may take years and further research to determine the direction of temperatures in the Antarctic and what they mean for the world. Climate scientists said the report should be treated with caution.
"That a very small part of the planet shows a short-term cooling is not in any way a surprise," said Ed Hawkins of the National Center for Atmospheric Science at the University of Reading in England. "It's what we expect from natural variation in the atmospheric circulation interacting with a long-term warming trend."
The findings will feed the debate about the significance of a slowdown in the pace of global warming seen since 1998.
The authors noted their study covered 1 percent of the Antarctic continent, a region that has warmed in the spring in the 1970s because of a hole in the atmosphere's ozone layer.
That gap now is starting to close, with an uncertain effect.
"It is important not to interpret the cooling of this small area of Antarctica as evidence that the climate is not warming," said Martyn Tranter at the University of Bristol.
"The cooling here has very little influence on global climate change. The overwhelming evidence is that the global climate is warming."
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