Posts Tagged ‘change’
As Arctic Night Falls, Sea Ice Holds Its Ground
Author: iloesy
The sun has just set at the top of the world, and the weather in that neck of the woods is about as lousy as you would expect. The temperature dropped to 4 degrees Fahrenheit earlier this week at the world’s northernmost outpost, Alert, in Canada’s Nunavut territory.
Another Arctic winter is coming.
Nevertheless, the high Arctic is still the epicenter of global climate change, and the scientific and policy controversies that surround the topic. Much of the region has just experienced another abnormally warm summer. Springtime snowpack was extremely low across Siberia, which set the stage for thawing breezes to blow offshore toward the Arctic Ocean’s ice pack. This followed a freakishly warm winter – part of last winter’s strong La Nina event – over Greenland and eastern Canada, which left that typically frigid locale almost devoid of sea ice last season.