<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
</head>
<body>
<div class="css-ov1ktg">
<div class=" css-1fkm2o5">
<div class="rail-wrapper css-so4veu">
<div class=" css-ac4z6z"><br>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div id="root">
<div class="css-vexkl">
<div class="css-g13mkd">
<div class="css-ov1ktg">
<div width="718" class="css-s84953">
<header class="css-d92687">
<h1 class="css-twhgrd">What a 100-degree day in Siberia
really means</h1>
<div class="css-1v1wi0p">
<div class="css-7kp13n">By</div>
<div class="css-7ol5x1"><span class="css-fgeroe">Alejandra
Borunda</span></div>
<div class="css-8rl9b7">nationalgeographic.com</div>
<div class="css-zskk6u">6 min</div>
</div>
<div class="css-1890bmp"><a
href="https://getpocket.com/redirect?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nationalgeographic.com%2Fscience%2F2020%2F06%2Fwhat-100-degree-day-siberia-means-climate-change%2F"
target="_blank" class="css-19cw8zk">View Original</a></div>
</header>
<div class="css-429vn2">
<div role="main" class="css-1ciuztk">
<div id="RIL_container">
<div id="RIL_body">
<div id="RIL_less">
<div lang="en">
<div>
<div>
<p>An extended heat wave that has been
baking the Russian Arctic for months
drove the temperature in Verkhoyansk,
Russia—north of the Arctic Circle—to
100.4°F on June 20, <a
href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/space/what-is-summer-winter-solstice-answer-might-surprise-you/">the
official first day of summer in the
Northern Hemisphere</a>. This record
high temperature is a signal of a
rapidly and continually warming planet,
and a preview of how Arctic warming will
continue in an increasingly hot future,
scientists say. <br>
</p>
</div>
<div>
<p>“For a long time, we’ve been saying
we’re going to get more extremes like
strong heat waves,” says <a
href="http://research.dmi.dk/staff/all-staff/rum/">Ruth
Mottram</a>, a climate scientist at
the Danish Meteorological Institute.
“It’s a little like the projections are
coming true, and sooner than we might
have thought.”</p>
<p> Saturday’s record wasn’t just a quick
spike before a return to more normal
summer temperatures for the Russian
Arctic: The heat wave behind it is
projected to continue for at least
another week. It was <a
href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/06/21/arctic-temperature-record-siberia/">the
hottest temperature ever recorded in
the town</a>, where records have been
kept since 1885. <br>
</p>
</div>
<div>
<h2><b>A climate-toasted Arctic</b> <br>
</h2>
</div>
<div>
<p><a>Hot summer days aren’t unheard of in
the Arctic</a>. The ocean-tempered
coasts tend to stay slightly cooler, but
inland, summer temperatures sometimes
soar. Fort Yukon, Alaska, recorded the
first-ever 100°F (37.7°C) day north of
the Arctic Circle in 1915; Verkhoyansk
hit 99.1°F (37.3°C) in 1988.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p>“At this time of the year, around the
summer solstice, you get 24 hours of
sunlight,” says <a
href="https://nsidc.org/research/bios/meier.html">Walt
Meier</a>, a climate scientist at the
National Snow and Ice Data Center.
“That’s a lot of solar energy coming in.
So in these high-latitude areas—80
degrees, 90 degrees, that’s not unheard
of.”</p>
</div>
<div>
<p>But climate change is “loading the
dice” toward extreme temperatures like
the one recorded this week, he says. The
Arctic is warming more than twice as
fast as the rest of the planet: Baseline
warmth in the high Arctic has increased
by between 3.6 to 5.4°F(2 to 3°C) over
the past hundred or so years. About
0.75°C of that has occurred in <a
href="https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/12/eaaw9883?ftag=">the
last decade alone</a>. (<a
href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warming/global-warming-overview/">Find
out more about climate change and how
humans are causing it</a>.)</p>
</div>
<div>
<p>That means any heat waves that hit the
region are strengthened by the extra
warming. So the average warmness of a
summer increases, and the extremes do
too.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p>This month’s super-hot day emerged from
a potent mix of factors. First, climate
change nudged base temperatures up.
Then, western Siberia experienced one of
its hottest-ever spring seasons,
according to <a
href="https://climate.copernicus.eu/investigating-unusually-mild-winter-and-spring-siberia">climate
scientists at the EU’s Copernicus
Climate Change Service</a>. Since
December, air temperatures in the region
have averaged nearly 11°F (6°C) above
the average seen between 1979 and 2019.
The high heat is also likely well above
the average seen in any similar
six-month stretch going back to 1880. In
May, air temperatures hovered some 18°F
(10°C) above the “normal” May average of
33.8°F (1°C )—something that would be <a
href="https://twitter.com/MartinStendel/status/1270382142049091584">likely
to occur only once in 100,000 years</a>,
if <a
href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warming/global-warming-effects/">human-caused
climate change</a> hadn’t thrown a
wrench in the climate system’s plumbing.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p>“It has been really bizarre to see,”
says <a
href="https://www.bsc.es/cvijanovic-ivana">Ivana
Cvijanovic</a>, a climate scientist at
the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.
“All across Siberia, it has really been
so hot for so long. January, then
February, then March, then April. The
pattern—it really stands out.”</p>
</div>
<div>
<p>The warm winter and hot spring meant
that the snow usually blanketing the
ground across much of the region melted
about a month earlier than normal.
Bright white snow plays a crucial role
in keeping parts of the Arctic cool, by
reflecting the sun’s incoming heat. Once
it had gone away, dirt and plants
readily soaked up the heat instead.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p>Then, the weather conditions aligned. A
big, high-pressure system settled into
place over western Siberia, where it
stalled. These kinds of systems often
have clear, cloudless skies—perfect for
solar heat to shine through
unobstructed, straight onto the hot
Siberian ground.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p>“The air is just kind of trapped there;
it’s like an oven sitting over the area,
just heating it up more and more the
longer it sits there,” says Meier.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p>In recent years, the effects of these
kinds of immobile heat waves have become
more obvious across the Arctic. In 2012,
<a
href="http://nsidc.org/greenland-today/2013/02/greenland-melting-2012-in-review/">97
percent of the Greenland ice sheet</a>’s
surface got so warm it turned
essentially to slush. In 2016, <a
href="http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2016/">it
was so warm in High Arctic Svalbard,
Norway, that rain fell instead of snow
for part of the winter</a>. Last
summer, the edges of the Greenland ice
sheet experienced up to three extra
months of <a
href="https://orbi.uliege.be/handle/2268/246645">melting
weather</a>. <a
href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/09/greenland-ice-getting-denser-thats-bad/">Limpid
blue pools formed on its surface</a>;
<a
href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/07/greenland-melting-second-time-this-summer-bad/">floods
of melt gushed off the edge of the
continent</a><u>,</u> and fires broke
out in its sparse landscapes after a
heat wave parked over the island for
weeks.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p>There’s a lively scientific debate
underway about whether these kinds of
heat waves in the high latitudes are <a
href="https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2017GL073395">lasting
longer</a> or becoming more frequent
than they were in the past because of
climate change. But there’s little
debate that the future holds much more
extreme heat for the Arctic. Winter
average temperatures in the Arctic have
already exceeded the 3.6°F (2°C)
threshold stated in the Paris climate
agreement; predictions suggest the
annual average temperature for the
region will exceed that within decades.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p>"By 2100, under an extreme warming
scenario, we would expect to see an
event like this every year," says Robert
Rohde, a climate scientist with <a
href="http://berkeleyearth.org/team/robert-rohde/">Berkeley
Earth.</a></p>
</div>
<div>
<p>Similar patterns are playing out at the
southern pole, too. A site on the
Antarctic Peninsula hit nearly 65°F
(18.3°C) during January, its summertime.</p>
</div>
<div>
<h2><b>Polar amplification and human
fingerprints</b></h2>
</div>
<div>
<p>The poles are warming up more quickly
than the rest of Earth because of a
phenomenon called “polar amplification.”
The sea ice that used to blanket much of
the Arctic Ocean provided a bright white
cap across the northernmost reaches of
the planet. Like the snow that reflects
incoming solar radiation in Siberia, the
ice bounced the sun’s heat back toward
space.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p>But as Earth has warmed, there’s less
sea ice covering the Arctic Ocean,
leaving behind dark waters that absorb
much more heat. Sea ice forms less
readily in that warm water, leading the
water to absorb even more solar heat,
and the system goes on a
self-reinforcing loop.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p>It’s difficult to say for sure that
this or that single heat wave was worse
because of climate change—and no one has
yet done that analysis for this stretch
of excessive Siberian warmth. But
researchers found human-caused climate
change’s fingerprints all over the heat
wave that caused excessive melting in
Greenland and across northern Europe
last summer. 2019’s June heat—which
caused temperatures in France to spike
above 113°F (45°C), was <a
href="https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/wp-content/uploads/WWA-Science_France_heat_June_2019.pdf">at
least five times more likely to occur
because of human impacts</a>. And some
60 percent of 2016’s excessive Arctic
heat was <a
href="http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2016/">attributable
to human-caused climate change</a>,
scientists found.</p>
</div>
<div>
<h2><b>Fires, oil spills</b></h2>
</div>
<div>
<p>This season’s hot weather comes with
consequences. Below the ground, much of
the Russian Arctic is covered in
permafrost, carbon-rich peat soils
capped by a layer of ice that usually
stays frozen for most or all of the
year. But hot air temperatures
destabilize the frozen ground and lead
to often irreparable change.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p>(<a
href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2018/08/news-arctic-permafrost-may-thaw-faster-than-expected/">Read
about how melting permafrost could
supercharge climate change—in a very
bad way</a>).</p>
</div>
<div>
<p>In June, defrosted soils <a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jun/09/russian-mining-firm-accused-of-using-global-heating-to-avoid-blame-for-oil-spill">may
have led to the collapse of a diesel
storage tank</a> in Siberia, spilling
20,000 metric tons of fuel into a nearby
river. <a
href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07557-4">A
recent study</a> suggests that this is
far from an isolated risk: By 2050,
scientists say, vast amounts of
infrastructure across the Arctic are at
risk from thawing ground collapsing
beneath them. Thousands of miles of
pipelines and roads, buildings and
storage tanks, oil fields and airports,
and more, all potentially destabilized
by overheated weather that has melted
the ground.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p>Fires have also been smoldering across
the Russian Arctic. The overwarm spring
dried out both soils and vegetation,
leaving them primed to burn, and over 12
million acres were on fire as of early
June, according to <a
href="http://public.aviales.ru/main_pages/openform1.shtml?2020-06-02">Russia’s
forest service</a>.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p>“There’s lot and lots of vegetation and
forest across Siberia,” says Meier. “And
when it’s hot like this for so long, it
dries out and becomes like a tinderbox</p>
</div>
</div>
<span></span> </div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="css-1uezb08"><br>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>