A team of researchers from the Finnish Meteorological Institute in Helsinki recently confirmed that, over the last four decades, the Arctic has been warming four times faster than the rest of the world. This rapid warming is caused in large part by a feedback loop in which warming melts sea ice, exposing more of the Arctic Ocean to sunlight and causing further warming, which in turn leads to further melting and warming. larger, resulting in a phenomenon called Arctic amplification.
Responsible? Climate change
The Arctic is warming at breakneck speed compared to the rest of the Earth. And this is just average, because some parts of the Arctic Ocean, like the Barents Sea between Russia and Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, are warming up to seven times faster, meteorologist Mika Rantanen of the Finnish Meteorological Institute in Helsinki has found. .
Warming is being stronger in the Arctic
Previous studies tended to say that the average Arctic temperature is rising two to three times faster than elsewhere, as humans continue to drive climate change. This study, published in Communications Earth & Environment , exposes that the forecasts were much more innocent than what reality shows us.
Temperatures are warming faster in the Arctic than in the rest of the world, largely due to loss of sea ice. When the bright, reflective ice melts, it gives way to a darker ocean. This amplifies the warming trend because the ocean surface absorbs more heat from the sun than the surface snow and ice. The magnitude of Arctic amplification is affected by both climate change caused by human activity and long-term natural variations in climate.
“Numerous studies report that the Arctic is warming twice, more than twice or even three times faster than the world on average. Here we show, using multiple observational data sets covering the Arctic region, that over the past 43 years, the Arctic has been warming almost four times faster than the world, which is a higher proportion of what which is generally reported in the literature,” the authors wrote. “Our results require further investigation of the mechanisms behind Arctic amplification and their representation in climate models,” the scientists concluded.
Even the best climate models aren’t doing a good job of reproducing that warming, the authors say. The inability of models to realistically simulate past Arctic amplification casts doubt on future forecasts in these areas.
Reference: M. Rantanen et al. The Arctic has warmed nearly four times faster than the globe since 1979. Communications Earth & Environment. Published online August 11, 2022. doi: 10.1038/s43247-022-00498-3.
