Canadian Arctic Summers Are Hotter Now Than They've Been in 44,000 Years

The Arctic has been warming at a faster rate than the planet as a whole, a trend that has been well-studied. What new research, published in Geophysical Research Letters, reveals is just how amazingly hot summers in the Arctic have gotten. Scientists from the University of Colorado Boulder have discovered that the Eastern Canadian Arctic has, for the past 100 years, been warmer than at any time in at least 44,000 years, and as much as the past 120,000.

This determination was made after looking at dead clumps of moss now emerging from ice on Baffin Island. Radiocarbon dating shows that these bits of moss were last above ice between 44,000 and 51,000 years ago.

Past this time, radiocarbon dating gets fuzzy, but looking at the geologic record of glaciation in the area pushes the dating back. Examination of ice cores shows that the last time summer temperatures were as warm as they are now is at the end of the last interglacial period, 120,000 years ago.

Also revealed by the study is that this region of the Canadian Arctic underwent roughly 2.7°C of cooling beginning about 5,000 years ago and ending about 100 years ago. Though this cooling ended roughly at the turn of the 20th century, the most pronounced warming, the scientists say, began in the 1970s.

Professor Gifford Miller, the study’s lead author, says, “All of Baffin Island is melting. We expect all of the ice caps to eventually disappear, even if there is no additional warming.”

If there’s any silver lining in this—any reason not to panic and start immediately moving inland now—is that there is considerable uncertainty about the time frame in which the world’s ice caps will fully disappear. It won’t happen this century; even in a worst case scenario they won't be gone by the end of the next century. Best case is another millennium before sea level rise maxes out. Of course, the disastrous effects of sea level rise will be felt far before we relive Waterworld.

As long as this fact is recognized and acted upon, there is time to prepare, migrate, deconstruct, and move onwards. That's assuming, of cousre, that other dangerous aspects of climate change, like reduction of crop yields predicted to occur due to rising temperatures and ocean acidification radically reducing availability of seafood, don’t do in humanity first.