In Chile, more than 130 people have died in this year’s wildfires — the deadliest in the nation’s history. In Colombia last month, wildfire smoke billowed just outside Bogotá, defying the city’s reputation for cold, wet weather. And in Argentina, a wildfire ravaged a forest that is listed as a World Heritage Site by the United Nations cultural organization UNESCO.

These wildfires add to the destruction from record-setting fires in the Amazon in October 2023. This is not a normal pattern: in many parts of the region, wildfires are not part of the landscape’s natural history, except for blazes caused by “occasional lightning strikes”, says Francisco de la Barrera, an environmental scientist at University of Concepción in Chile.

But scientists say that the flames have been fanned by a combination of a strong El Niño climate pattern, a profusion of non-native trees and climate change. Researchers warn that the same factors could put other cities on the continent at risk.

Source: https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/t2_daily/?dm_id=tropics

The Circumpolar Current works as a regulator of the planet's climate. Its origins were thought to have caused the formation of the permanent ice in Antarctica about 34 million years ago. Now, a study led by the University of Barcelona, the Instituto Andaluz de Ciencias de la Tierra (CSIC) and the Imperial College London (United Kingdom) has cast doubt on this theory, and has changed the understanding of how the ice sheet in Antarctic developed in the past, and what this could mean in the future as the planet's climate changes.

The article, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, breaks with the classical view on the origins of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, the largest marine current on Earth and which is decisive in the ocean circulation and climate change.