According to the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA), over the last week satellites over Antarctica have been registering the so-called “sudden stratospheric warming” - that is, a sharp increase in air temperature at an altitude of about 30-50 kilometers:
In recent years, this phenomenon is not rare, and in the northern hemisphere it began to be observed annually. In the press, it is now most often referred to as “splitting of the circumpolar vortex”:
The essence of the phenomenon boils down to the fact that due to a sharp warming of air in the stratosphere above the pole, there is a violation of the local circulation of the atmosphere and cold air from the surface ceases to rise into the stratosphere, where the vortex sucks it like a vacuum cleaner. As a consequence, in the corresponding hemisphere, there is an “open refrigerator effect” - that is, ice-cold air from the pole spreads towards the equator.
In 2018, this situation led to abnormally cold winters in Europe, which the press dubbed as "The Beast from the East." The beast, of course, was not entirely from the east, but from the Pole, where it spread first to Siberia, and then to England, where even the fireplaces froze.
In 2019, the same thing happened in the United States and until April, railway workers rushed about at the crossings and poured gasoline on the switches to somehow heat them up before the train aisle and prevent the metal from cracking. Now the same thing awaits Australia and New Zealand, where summer (that is, as it were, winter) was not ice (more precisely, full ice):
Promotional video:
NIWA computer models indicate that stratospheric warming will peak on Friday, August 30, with cooling in Australia and New Zealand starting in mid-September. Now you will not envy the local koalas, and the natives will probably go to the Eskimos' survival seminars and learn from them to build an igloo. However, these are all little things before what is to come.
This most "stratospheric warming" was first observed in Australia in 2002, after which such a severe cold came that it broke all local records in the history of observations. Then the phenomenon was repeated in 2010 and everything was the same. Now comes 2019, when "this has never happened, and here it is again." That is, the dynamics are growing.
At the same time, exactly the same thing is happening on the other side of the Earth, and it has come to the point that lightning has already begun to be observed over the North Pole. The only reason why this can happen is some kind of processes in the global magnetic field.
The stratosphere is ions, there are few molecules. Purely theoretically, the ionosphere (mesosphere, mesopause and thermosphere) is higher, but practically there is nothing in these layers of the atmosphere and the main shield from external radiation is the stratosphere, which, as a result of the collision with the solar wind, just breaks up into ions. And what controls the ions?
That's right - the ions are controlled by the magnetic field. It has a much greater effect on the stratosphere than atmospheric currents. That is why the northern lights are observed near the poles, since ions are pulled there by a magnet. But, since some disturbances in the circulation of stratospheric ions begin, then something is wrong with this magnet. This allows us to assume that the magnetic pole shift is a matter of the very near future and we can only follow the development of events.