The Arctic Circle has warmed at a rate four times faster than the rest of the planet in the last 40 years due to climate change, according to a report published on Thursday, which warned that the phenomenon is deeper than the latest studies indicated. .
This was determined by a team of experts in Norway and Finland who analyzed temperature data collected via satellite since 1979 over the Arctic region, thereby recorded a warming of 0.75ºC on average every decade, four times more than the rest of the planetexplained the scientists in the study published on the scientific portal Communications Earth & Environment.
“Until now the belief was that the Arctic was warming approximately twice as fast as the rest of the planet, so I was a little surprised when our figure appeared much higher,” he explained to the AFP agency. Antti Lipponen, co-author of the study and member of the Finnish Meteorological Institute.
In its last report of 2019, the group of climate experts of the United Nations (UN) had calculated that the upper percentage of warming, known as “Arctic amplification”, was between two and three times greater than in the rest of the planet.
The researchers also recorded “significant regional variations” within the Arctic Circle and sectors such as the Eurasian Arctic Ocean, near the Svalbard (Norway) and Nova Zembla (Russia) archipelagos, which warmed up to 1.25º C per decade, that is, seven times more than the rest of the world.
“Something is happening in the Arctic and it will affect us all”Antti Lipponen
“Climate change is caused by humans. As the Arctic warms, its glaciers will melt and that will affect sea levels globally.“, Lipponen maintained and asserted: “Something is happening in the Arctic and it will affect us all.”
The warming of the Arctic region, they said, has a profound impact on local communities and wildlife such as polar bears.
With this accelerated warming, caused by climate change, the ice in the Arctic region is absorbing heat instead of bouncing it back, as it should, and that excess water from the continental and insular regions of the polar circle is directed to the mass oceanic.
The melting ice in Greenland is thus approaching “a point of no return”according to some studies, and that frozen mass contains enough water to raise the sea level “up to six meters throughout the planet,” AFP reported.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the sea level has risen 20 centimeters since 1900 and the phenomenon is accelerating since the 1990sin a context in which climate change has already caused an increase in the planet’s average temperature of 1.1º C compared to the pre-industrial era.
According to the World Meteorological Organization, the rise in temperatures is on track to be between 2.5 and 3 degrees.
