If there’s no one there to listen… does it rain in the Arctic?

I love a good mystery as much as the next person, given that the next person is my father with the entire Agatha Christie collection sitting on his shelf. So every once in awhile it’s nice to indulge in a bit of an intellectual or scientific mystery.

Scientists have recently been provided with one such mystery that has really raised some eyebrows; mine included (although how much that is saying, I don’t know).

The Polarstern has made more than thirty expeditions to Antarctica and the Arctic since she was originally commissioned back in 1982. Specifically designed for working in the frozen seas of the Polar Regions, she is described as “a floating large scale laboratory.”

So when German scientist Ursula Schauer and her colleagues aboard the Polarstern this past September witnessed a day of rain, they were puzzled.

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The puzzlement stems from the fact that this is the first rain ever to be recorded falling at the North Pole. This does not necessarily preclude the possibility that it rains often, but so far, no one has made note of it.

“We are trying to find out,” said David Carlson, director of the International Polar Year. “But it’s not that easy a question — who operates a rain gauge at the North Pole?”

Carlson believes that it actually has rained before, and that the only location where they might find evidence of such rain is in Moscow. After reading her blog, “several of us said: ‘where would you go to find out whether that has ever happened before’?” Carlson said. The team believes that their best chance lies in Moscow, where archives of arctic research camps may shed light – or as the case may be – rain on the problem.

The reason that I feel comfortable enough mentioning this hear at EcoWorldly is because if it is an abnormality, is it as a result of global warming? I tend to agree with Carlson, given a substantial amount of layman knowledge of the region, and that this is not another symptom to lay at the feet of global warming. But who knows?

Reuters - How often does it rain at the North Pole?

Image courtesy of the Alfred Wegener Institute

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