“To have a new record set that quickly is surprising, but who knows how long that will last? Possibly not that long at all.”

A record-breaking temperature of 65 degrees was taken at an Argentinian research base in Antarctica on Thursday, surpassing the continent’s previous record of 63.5 degrees set in March 2015.

#Antártida | Nuevo récord de temperaturas ?️

Este mediodía la Base #Esperanza registró un nuevo récord histórico (desde 1961) de temperatura, con 18,3°C. Con este valor se supera el récord anterior de 17,5°C del 24 en marzo de 2015. Y no fue el único récord… pic.twitter.com/rhKsPFytCb

— SMN Argentina (@SMN_Argentina) February 6, 2020

“[This record] doesn’t come as any surprise,” Eric Steig, a glaciologist studying climate change at the University of Washington, told the Washington Post, saying the record will likely be broken again shortly. “Although there is decade-to-decade variability, the underlying trend across most of the continent is warming… we can expect these sorts of records to be set again and again, even if they aren’t set every single year.”

James Renwick, a climate scientist at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, echoed Steig’s sentiment in a comment with the Guardian: “To have a new record set that quickly is surprising, but who knows how long that will last? Possibly not that long at all.”

Antarctica’s new record comes days after last month was declared the warmest January on record, which followed NASA declaring 2010-19 the hottest decade in recorded history. Ocean temperatures recently hit a record high and experts say that extreme weather events like the Australia bushfire will become more frequent as a result of climate change.

“What’s happening is persistent, not a fluke due to some weather phenomenon. We know that the long-term trends are being driven by the increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,” Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told Al Jazeera last month.

University of Florida researcher James Powell found in a study published at SAGE in November that “the consensus among research scientists on anthropogenic global warming has grown to 100%, based on a review of 11,602 peer-reviewed articles on ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’ published in the first 7 months of 2019”, the first time consensus among climate scientists was found to be 100%.

“This is a record from only a single station, but it is in the context of what’s happening elsewhere and is more evidence that as the planet warms we get more warm records and fewer cold records,” Dr Steve Rintoul, a leading oceanographer and Antarctic expert at CSIRO, told the Guardian.