Seminar by Dr. Seong-Joong Kim from Korea Polar Research Institute (KOPRI)
15 October 2025
KST 10:00
The Seminar is being held in Room 1010 (Jasmin) – Integrated mechanical engineering building. Click here for the campus map.
Since the Industrial Revolution, the global average annual temperature has risen by 1.09ºC by 2020. According to the 6th Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, the ongoing global warming is due to increased use of fossil fuels. Although the magnitude of warming since the Industrial Revolution appears to be small, this rate of warming is unprecedentedly fast in the history of Earth’s climate change. As a result, various extreme weather events frequently occur around the world. To make matters worse, the Arctic is warming much faster than the rest globe by three to four times. This fast Arctic warming is called Arctic amplification, which is especially strong in winter. Associated with the rapid warming of the Arctic, sea ice is melting rapidly in summer and freezing delayed in fall and early winter, disrupting the polar vortices by activation of planetary waves and resulting in more frequent occurrences of severe cold waves in midlatitudes including northeast Asia and North America. In contrast to the amplified temperature response of the Arctic to the increase of greenhouse gases, in Antarctica, mitigated warming or even cooling trend has been observed for the past decades. Until 2014, sea ice had shown increasing trend by surface ocean cooling, which is due to the dominant role of internal variability such as Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO) and Atlantic Multidecadal Variability over an increase in greenhouse gases. In addition, the decline in stratospheric ozone concentration contributed to the cooling of Antarctica and sea ice increase. However, since the 2000s, the cooling trend over most of Antarctica has reversed into warming trend, due to the weakening of southern hemisphere polar vortex in part by the recovery of stratospheric ozone concentration. Nevertheless, according to the results of a numerical model simulation for future carbon dioxide increase scenario, if fossil fuels are continued to be used at the current level, warming is expected to occur throughout the entire Antarctica within 100 years in parallel with the ongoing amplified Arctic. In other words, the impact of external forcing of greenhouse gas increase will be predominant over the magnitude of natural fluctuations in the future, and sea ice and ice shelves are expected to disappear, causing damage like as sea level rise.