18 | New Scientist | 15 August 2020
“THE conditions we’ve seen in the
Arctic this year have been truly
remarkable, and not in a good
way,” says Michael Meredith,
a polar researcher at the British
Antarctic Survey.
Even for a region that has
warmed twice as fast as the rest
of the planet, this year’s Arctic
fires and ice melt have been
extraordinary. The first half
of 2020 has seen temperature
records tumble in one of the
coldest places on Earth.
The symbolic milestone of
100°F was passed in the Siberian
town of Verkhoyansk in June, on
the way to a record high of 38°C.
Longyearbyen in the Norwegian
archipelago of Svalbard in the
Arctic Ocean hit an all-time high
of 21.7°C in July, hotter than Oslo
that day. The Svalbard Global
Seed Vault, where thousands
of crop seeds are stored, was
built in this location thanks to
its supposedly cool climate.
It hasn’t just been hot, but
hot for an extended period. The
Arctic circle was around 8°C above
average for the first half of the
year, and 10°C above average in
June. Although this has been
driven by a natural variation in
the weather-affecting jet stream
that travels high above the North
Atlantic, it would also have been
almost impossible without the
greenhouse gases we have
pumped into the atmosphere.
Siberia’s heatwave is thought to
have been made at least 600 times
more likely by climate change.
“I think 2020 is a clear window into
what is to come,” says Meredith.Unfrozen north
One big effect has been drastically
shrinking sea ice, which polar
bears rely on to hunt their prey.
Meanwhile, satellite images have
brought a daily reminder of firesminimum extent in September
before beginning to refreeze,
has been on a sharp decline for
decades. The 14 smallest extents
have occurred in the past 14 years,
says Walt Meier at the US National
Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).
The melt started unusually
early this year. As of 6 August,
the ice covered 5.8 million square
kilometres, 27 per cent less than
the 1980-2010 average. At this rate,
2020 could break the 2012 record
for the lowest area of ice ever seen.
Julienne Stroeve, also at the
NSIDC, was in the Arctic from
December 2019 to March 2020
aboard a ship deliberately stuck
in an ice floe to study the region.
“The thing that surprised me
the most was how dynamic the
ice pack was. It was very mobile,”
she says. “That’s probably a result
of thinner ice overall.”
That thinness is partly due to a
weather phenomenon called theClimate changeKJEKO
L/GET
TY
IMAG
ES
/IS
TOCK
PHOT
O38°C
Record Arctic temperature,
recorded this June600
Climate change made the
Siberian heatwave at least
this many times more likely18
Arctic C0 2 emissions haven’t
been as high for this many yearsNews Insight
A warning cry from the Arctic
As records tumble, 2020 has already been a terrifyingly bad year
for the Arctic – and there is more to come, Adam Vaughan reportsblazing in northern forests and
underground peat, resulting in
the region releasing the most
carbon dioxide in 18 years. And
Russia’s worst oil spill in modern
times, which began near Norilsk
in the Arctic on 29 May, seems
to have been due to a container
collapsing as the permafrost
it sat on thawed in the heat.
The simultaneous nature of
these events has researchers
worried. Last year saw record fires,
while sea ice loss was bad but
not unprecedented. This year
is different. “It’s the confluence
of all of them. Each of these as
individual events and phenomena
are exceptional in their own
right,” says Carly Phillips at the
University of British Columbia
in Canada. “The fact they’re
all occurring simultaneously
should raise alarms.”
Arctic sea ice, which melts in
summer and usually reaches itsColourful houses in
summer at Longyearbyen
in Svalbard, Norway