West Antarctic Warming Faster Than Thought, Study Finds

A paper released Sunday by the journal Nature Geoscience reports that the temperature at a research station in the middle of West Antarctica has warmed by 4.4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1958. That is roughly twice as much as scientists previously thought and three times the overall rate of global warming, making central West Antarctica one of the fastest-warming regions on earth.

“The surprises keep coming,” said Andrew J. Monaghan, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., who took part in the study. “When you see this type of warming, I think it’s alarming.”

Of course, warming in Antarctica is a relative concept. West Antarctica remains an exceedingly cold place, with average annual temperatures in the center of the ice sheet that are nearly 50 degrees Fahrenheit below freezing.

But the temperature there does sometimes rise above freezing in the summer, and the new research raises the possibility that it might begin to happen more often, potentially weakening the ice sheet through surface melting. The ice sheet is already under attack at the edges by warmer ocean water, and scientists are on alert for any new threat.

A potential collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is one of the long-term hazards that have led experts to worry about global warming. The base of the ice sheet sits below sea level, in a configuration that makes it especially vulnerable. Scientists say a breakup of the ice sheet, over a period that would presumably last at least several hundred years, could raise global sea levels by 10 feet, possibly more.

The new research is an attempt to resolve a scientific controversy that erupted several years ago about exactly how fast West Antarctica is warming. With few automated weather stations and even fewer human observers in the region, scientists have had to use statistical techniques to infer long-term climate trends from sparse data.

A nearby area called the Antarctic Peninsula, which juts north from West Antarctica and for which fairly good records are available, was already known to be warming rapidly. A 2009 paper found extensive warming in the main part of West Antarctica, but those results were challenged by a group that included climate change contrarians.

To try to get to the bottom of the question, David H. Bromwich of Ohio State University pulled together a team that focused on a single temperature record. At a lonely outpost called Byrd Station, in central West Antarctica, people and automated equipment have been keeping track of temperature and other weather variables since the late 1950s.

It is by far the longest weather record in that region, but it had intermittent gaps and other problems that had made many researchers wary of it. The Bromwich group decided to try to salvage the Byrd record.

They retrieved one of the sensors and recalibrated at the University of Wisconsin. They discovered a software error that had introduced mistakes into the record and then used computerized analyses of the atmosphere to fill the gaps.

The reconstruction will most likely undergo intensive scientific scrutiny, which Dr. Bromwich said he would welcome. “We’ve tested everything we could think of,” he said.

Assuming the research holds up, it suggests that the 2009 paper, far from overestimating warming in West Antarctica, had probably underestimated it, especially in summer.

Eric J. Steig, a University of Washington researcher who led the 2009 work, said in an interview that he considered his paper to have been supplanted by the new research. “I think their results are better than ours, and should be adopted as the best estimate,” he said. He noted that the new Byrd record matches a recent temperature reconstruction from a nearby borehole in the ice sheet, adding confidence in the findings.

Much of the warming discovered in the new paper happened in the 1980s, around the same time the planet was beginning to warm briskly. More recently, Dr. Bromwich said, the weather in West Antarctica seems to have become somewhat erratic. In the summer of 2005, the interior of West Antarctica warmed enough for the ice to undergo several days of surface melting.

Dr. Bromwich is worried that this could eventually become routine, perhaps accelerating the decay of the West Antarctic ice sheet, but the warming is not fast enough for that to happen right away. “We’re talking decades into the future, I think,” Dr. Bromwich said.

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Character Study: Banshidhar Medeiros, Soul Surfer, Dances With Waves

“There are a lot less distractions out there in the winter,” Mr. Medeiros said. “It becomes a form of meditation. You fix on one point, the horizon, and you start to feel at one with the rhythm of the ocean. When you’re in that state and you catch a wave, it becomes an effortless dance, a flow.”

Winter surfing brings out big waves and deters lightweights. It turns a surf session into something akin to an arctic expedition. But when he’s in the right state of consciousness — a state Mr. Medeiros has spent his life pursuing — the icy ocean can become a bubbling caldron of spiritual bliss.

“When it’s cold, it’s more fun,” said Mr. Medeiros, who began riding the waves as a child in Hawaii. Since his teenage years, he has followed the spiritual teachings of Sri Chinmoy, an Indian-born guru who in the 1960s established a meditation center in Queens with a devoted colony of followers. Mr. Medeiros keeps a small photograph of Mr. Chinmoy laminated onto the middle of his longboard — a Hawaiian-made nine-footer.

“It keeps me centered — he’s my guardian angel,” said Mr. Medeiros, who rents a room in a house with other disciples in the Briarwood section of Queens. Mr. Chinmoy died in 2007, but there are still several hundred disciples living here around his old house and following his spiritual path of prayer, meditation, vegetarianism, celibacy and extreme physical challenges.

Mr. Medeiros rises at 4:30 a.m. and practices meditation and yoga. Then he drives to Long Beach for a surf session, usually alone but sometimes with a few other disciples. He enjoys paddling out at daybreak, as the first streaks of dawn paint the sky. Then he heads to work, at a Queens factory making silk screen materials.

On Friday, he loaded his board into his minivan and headed south on the traffic-clogged Van Wyck Expressway. Tucked on his dashboard were two photographs of Mr. Chinmoy, and Mr. Medeiros drank from a special warming potion of juice infused with nut butters. He parked near the beach next to some frozen puddles and pulled on his thick wet suit with a hood, bootees and gloves. The air temperature was in the mid-30s; the water in the mid-40s.

As Mr. Chinmoy taught him, before entering the water Mr. Medeiros meditated on avoiding danger by “focusing on positive things and clearing the mind of all negativity,” he said. He also draws on some Hawaiian customs.

“Before I paddle out, I have a mantra,” he said. “I chant to the aumakua, a Hawaiian word for the gods that dwell in and protect a certain space. I pray to the soul of the ocean, asking for protection, and permission to enter their space.”

After an hour riding head-high waves, he headed back to his minivan and dumped a large Thermos of hot water over himself to warm up and rinse off.

At 14, Mr. Medeiros moved with his family from Maui to Puerto Rico, another prime surfing location. Within several years, the young surfer had joined a meditation center that Mr. Chinmoy opened in San Juan.

He recalled the first time he meditated with Mr. Chinmoy, in 1970: “It was like being pulled up by this tremendous force, rising like a rocket, with the earth getting smaller below.”

“There was just peace and absolute expansion,” he remembered. “I was just blissed out, and I knew then he was my master.”

Mr. Medeiros, whose given first name was Charles, was renamed by Mr. Chinmoy.

“Banshidhar means ‘He who plays the inner melody, and stirs the inner spirit,’ ” said Mr. Medeiros, who lived in various cities over the years and would see Mr. Chinmoy regularly on group trips and visits. As a member of Mr. Chinmoy’s marathon team, he ran ultramarathons for self-transcendence and to honor the guru. In 1985, at Mr. Chinmoy’s suggestion, he ran 3,000 miles from California to New York, a 108-day trip through desert heat and subzero temperatures.

By 2005 Mr. Medeiros was back in Maui, but again at Mr. Chinmoy’s prompting he abruptly quit his printer’s job there and moved to New York. He never wanted to bother with the East Coast’s sporadic surf, but Mr. Chinmoy realized that Mr. Medeiros was going through some gnarly surf withdrawal and urged him to hit the waves.

“So I bought a wet suit, and soon I was out there surfing in the snow, and it felt so exhilarating,” he said. “He knew it would help me spiritually.”

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Pew Study Finds One in 6 Follows No Religion

A global study of religious adherence by Pew Research Center has found that about one of every six people has no religious affiliation, making the “unaffiliated” the third-largest group worldwide.

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