Accelerated stress tests are commonly applied in order to obtain a prediction of fuel cell life time within a short testing period. The stress test in this work considers a fuel cell which is constantly under load with frequent periods of very high current. Four different cells were operated each with a specific load profile. As a result severe performance degradation was observed in the region of high current densities. A short overview over the phenomena which may contribute to this specific fuel cell degradation is compiled from literature. Based on this overview major degradation modes are identified and combined with a simple polarization curve model. The modeling results allow for two different interpretations. Carbon corrosion reactions can explain the observed effects if cell voltage is assumed as the driving force for degradation. A better fit was obtained by using the overall heat flux as degradation criterion. In this case an increase in local temperature could lead to redistribution and loss of phosphoric acid from the MEA. The results are supported by the fact that the model yields consistent time dependend results for four different and non-periodic load cycles. (C) The Author(s) 2014. Published by ECS. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (CC BY, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse of the work in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. All rights reserved.