The NOAA report states that as the Arctic warms, “alarming” and “extraordinary” rates of change

This The Arctic is hot And change rapidly in 2020 with record or near-record conditions across the region. That’s according to an international team of 133 researchers from more than a dozen countries who contributed to the 15th annual NOAA Arctic Report Card, released on Tuesday.

The report is a comprehensive year-over-year review of the Arctic conditions – what NOAA calls important signals – showing the health and sustainability of the Arctic ecosystem. These include variables such as air temperature, sea ice and the like Wildland fire. While weather conditions in this marginal part of the world usually change naturally with the speed of snow, change has been taking place at a rapid pace in recent years.

In a video accompanying the report, NOAA says the “Arctic Report Card” since 2006 has seen “terrible rates of change”, adding that “the rate of change has been phenomenal.”

Evidence of this can be found in the intense heat and wildfires in Siberia this summer. It is not uncommon for deep rural events in the rural Arctic region to make headlines around the world, but for the first time on record in late June, The temperature has risen above the 100 degree Fahrenheit mark Above the Arctic Circle, in a city called Varkhoyansk. It was part of a heatwave of several months, meteorologists said 600 times more likely Through human-climate change.

October From October 2019 to September 2020, Arctic surface temperatures were the second hottest on record – about 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above the normal average of 1980-2007 – just behind 2016, one year affected by a very strong global El Nino event.

The cause of rapid warming is straightforward and well understood: it is the change in the human-climate environment. But in the Arctic, the speed of warming is 2 to 3 times the global average – a phenomenon known as Arctic amplification.

At the end of the summer, the sea-ice limit in 2020 was the second highest in the 42-year satellite record, just behind the summer of 2012, a summer characterized by unusual stormy conditions that break the ice, the report said. But this October, when sea-ice usually bounces fast, it wasn’t The lowest level on record.

The sea-ice ratio in October-October 2020 was also the lowest value on record. The ice was so thin that Russia could not find enough ice to test its new nuclear-powered ice-breaker. The drop is part of a long-term trend in which sea-ice has fallen by two-thirds since the 1970s due to a decrease in ice thickness.

This dramatic drop in Arctic ice is the main driver for rapid Arctic changes.

Large areas of sea-ice and low amounts of ice stabilize the Arctic climate by regulating air and sea temperatures. White shading reflects sunlight back into space, limiting heating. But as temperatures have risen steadily over the past few decades, ice cover has fallen sharply, especially as darker oceans and lands are more exposed. The darker the surface absorbs more heat, which leads to warmer temperatures and more melting.

This does not represent a single subtle shift in the functioning of the system – it is a dramatic change. The way to control the ice climate against open land and sea is quite different. Not only does the open area absorb more heat, it also allows sea and air currents to penetrate deeper into the Arctic, allowing warmth to invade from southern latitudes.

Rick Thoman Alaska is a climate expert at Fairbanks University in Alaska and co-author of this report. He says systemic changes in the Arctic should raise eyebrows to the south, as it foretells what could happen to the rest of us.

Arctic bells continue to ring as a warning of the low latitude of how things can change quickly when the therm hold is exceeded. “The threshold may not be the same, of course, but the Arctic is living proof that major environmental changes do not need to move slowly for generations.”

One major environmental change is the rapid loss of permafrost along the coast. Erosion of coastal permafrost (partially stable land) in the Arctic has increased everywhere since the early 2000s. U.S. And in the Canadian Beaufort Sea, the erosion rate has increased by 80% to 160% compared to data from a few decades ago.

It may seem hostile, but snow accumulation during the 2019-20 winter was higher than normal throughout the Arctic. However, this is understandable because warmer climates have more humidity, dump more ice, as long as the air temperature stays cool or close.

That said, due to the extraordinary spring warmth of the Eurasian Arctic, the extent of the June snowfall in the region was still recorded in 1967. And late spring snow cover isn’t just limited to 2020. Since 1981, the June Arctic ice cover has been declining at a rate of 15% per decade.

Changes in seasonal snow cover are an important control over wildland fire activity in the northern latitudes, and declining spring and summer snow cover has resulted in increased wildlife activity in the Arctic. In 2020, Record-setting Arctic fire – mainly in Siberia’s boreal forest – 35% more carbon dioxide was emitted than the previous year, which was also a recordbreaker.

These more intense wildfires are due to the drying up of accumulated layers of organic matter partially decomposed by prolonged hot, dry conditions, as observed in Siberia this year. This provides a high octane fuel source.

“Increasing trends in air temperature and fuel availability over the 41-year record (1979-179) indicate that conditions are becoming more favorable for fire growth, more intense burning, more episodes of fire growth and more fuel consumption,” the report said.

Change is being experienced not only on land, but also in the Arctic Ocean. This summer the sea surface temperature was 1 to 3 degrees Celsius (2 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit) above normal.

Unusual hot water is one reason it took so long to bring this fall back into the sea-ice.

But this hot water also comes with some positive biological effects. The NOAA reports that in the Laptev Sea near Siberia, the technical term for the amount of life – the primary productivity of the sea – is 2 to 6 times higher than normal. Benefiting from this increase in biological activity is the Bowhead Whale, the main tool for coastal indigenous peoples from Russia to Greenland. Due to the increase in ancillary ocean life over the past 30 years, the population of bounhead whales has increased.

Despite those rare examples of positive influences, most of the changes are happening so fast that they are becoming unstable to indigenous populations, ecosystems and weather patterns. And the man says that the Arctic will not settle into the “new normal”, or that what was considered normal will return soon, because the only stability in the Arctic at the moment is change.

“Because Arctic changes are associated with ice and snow changes in a timate way, and these are positive feedback loops, this is not something that can be replaced with a cold winter (multi-year snow, takes many years to grow),” explains . Thoman. “That said, it will take generations for ‘frozen Arctic’ like in the 1960s, and in some areas it will take a long time for things like permafrost to re-enter.”