Members of the Alaska Wilderness League protest at a news conference where House Republicans unveiled the "American Energy Act" on the front steps of the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington on July 23, 2008. The legislation calls for expanded production of oil and gas in America including drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Coastal Plain. (UPI Photo/Kevin Dietsch) | License Photo

Blue and green light the waters off Namibia in early November 2007 as a phytoplankton bloom grew and faded in the Atlantic Ocean. The bloom stretches from north to south along hundreds of miles, although it is brightest in the center of this image. Such blooms are common in the coastal waters off southwest Africa where cold, nutrient-rich currents sweep north from Antarctica and interact with the coastal shelf. (UPI Photo/NASA) | License Photo

This graphic shows the data from the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) Earth Probe, for the month of September 2000. Areas of depleted ozone over the Antarctic are shown in blue. The area is three times larger than the entire land mass of the United States and is the largest such area ever observed. The United Nations' weather organization said that the atmosphere will take up to 15 years longer than previously expected to recover from pollution and repair its ozone hole on August 18, 2006. (UPI Photo/NASA) | License Photo

This image released by NASA shows what a team of scientist say is evidence that extensive areas of snow melted in west Antarctica due to warming temperatures. This images was obtained by NASA's QuikScat satellite and shows extensive areas of snow melt, shown in yellow and red, in west Antarctica in January 2005. (UPI Photo/NASA/JPL) | License Photo

For millions of years, Antarctica, the frozen continent at the southern end of the planet, has been encased in a gigantic sheet of ice. Recently, the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite has been taking sensitive measurements of the gravity for the entire Earth, including Antarctica. Recent analysis of GRACE data indicate that the Antarctic ice sheet might have lost enough mass to cause the worlds' oceans to rise about .05 inches, on the average, from between 2002 and 2005. The picture was taken on the Riiser-Larsen ice shelf in December 1995. (UPI Photo/NASA/GRACE team/DLR/Ben Holt Sr.) | License Photo

LONDON, Nov. 1 (UPI) -- Temperature increases in Antarctica and the Arctic region are the result of man-made emissions of greenhouse gases, researchers in England have concluded.

The Independent reported Saturday that the study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, marks the first time scientists have been able to prove a link between climate changes in both polar regions and human activities.


"We're able for the first time to directly attribute warming in both the Arctic and the Antarctic to human influences on the climate," said Nathan Gillett of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, who led the study.

The findings run counter to the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which found that Antarctica was the only continent where the human impact on the climate had not been observed.

"For a long time, climate scientists have known that Arctic areas would be expected to warm most strongly because of feedback mechanisms, but the results from this work demonstrate the part man has already played in the significant warming that we've observed in both polar regions," said Peter Stott of the Met Office Hadley Center, who took part in the modeling analysis.