The Arctic spring is arriving 16 days earlier than it did a decade ago, according to a new study which shows climate change is shifting the season earlier more dramatically the further north one go.
The research, published on Friday in the journal Scientific Reports, comes amid growing concern about the warming of far northern regions, which have recently experienced unusually prolonged and frequent midwinter temperature spikes.
This underlines how pronounced climate change is in the Arctic, where temperatures are rising twice as fast as the global average and ice fields are rapidly shrinking.
The warming trend has been unusually apparent in recent weeks. Although the sun has not reached the high Arctic since October, temperatures has been above freezing for 61 hours – more than three times the previous record – at Greenland’s northernmost weather monitoring station. The consequences would include increased melting of the ice sheet, less sea ice, thawing permafrost both on land and under the sea, less snow and more rain even in winter.
The weather has appeared out of joint seasonally and geographically. As much of northern Europe was hit by blizzards and chills, the Danish media joked that residents should visit the Arctic special forces base at Daneborg because it is warmer there.
The handful of troops at the base are used to spending months in cold and darkness. But there is increasingly frequent respite in the form of warm “foehn wind”. This abrupt warming and drying of moist winds as they pass over ice-masses or mountains is commonly seen in the Alps.
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Source: The Guardian, 3 March 2018