The Arctic is burning, and that’s bad for everyone
Siberia is having a record year. A region known for its icy terrain has recently seen temperatures more common in Atlanta than the Arctic.
Siberia is having a record year. A region known for its icy terrain has recently seen temperatures more common in Atlanta than the Arctic.
Last month, Siberia made national headlines when it had its first recorded 100-degree Fahrenheit day. A week later, it saw temperatures in the 90s. Those days capped off the region’s hottest June on record, which was 18 degrees hotter than average.
It’s not as if Siberia is expected to be a frozen wasteland in the middle of summer. Average temperatures for July are in the 60s. But dramatic heatwaves are becoming more frequent, creating a warming trend playing out across the Arctic and the globe.
Over the last decade, the Arctic has warmed 0.75 degrees Celsius — double the global rise of 0.38 degrees in that time frame. This increase is driven by a phenomenon called polar amplification.
Polar amplification works like this: A white blanket of snow or ice covers the Arctic, reflecting sunlight and keeping the area cold. When that snow or ice melts, however, it loses that protective covering and the exposed ground instead absorbs sunlight, amplifying warming. The same plays out in water: As reflective ice sheets melt, darker waters are exposed, absorbing more heat from the sun and causing a viscous self-reinforcing cycle.
Making matters worse is what’s happening with permafrost, which, as its name indicates, is thick land ice that is permanent year round. Higher temperatures have even started melting this “permanent” deep layer of ice, which can release diseases, increase sea levels, and destabilize the ground.
Last month, Russia’s government saw the consequences of melting permafrost firsthand, as a fuel tank at a Siberian power plant collapsed when the permafrost it was built on softened. The resulting oil spill prompted Russia’s president Vladimir Putin to declare a state of emergency, but only after 20,000 tons of diesel oil leaked into a nearby river.
We can only expect accidents like this to continue, according to a recent study published in Nature Communications. Researchers found that permafrost thawing puts at risk nearly four million people and 70% of infrastructure in the Arctic.
Permafrost thaw is an even bigger problem globally. A 2019 United Nations report calls thawing permafrost the “sleeping giant” of climate change because of its unknown potential to derail climate goals. According to the report, Arctic permafrost traps something like 1.5 trillion tonnes of carbon that, when melted and released as methane, can dramatically speed up climate change.
This is in a world that just hit record levels of methane in the atmosphere, according to a study published Tuesday.
Now, wildfires are breaking out in the Arctic, spewing out more carbon dioxide than ever recorded. This year’s wildfire season is worse than last year’s, which was also really bad.
“Higher temperatures and drier surface conditions are providing ideal conditions for these fires to burn and to persist for so long over such a large area,” Mark Parrington, a senior scientist at Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service, said in a statement.
With the COVID-19 pandemic upending our everyday life, it’s easy to forget about a region as remote as Siberia, whose identity is based on being really far away. But a warming Arctic is anything but isolated and, in fact, actively fuels global climate change.
“Methane escaping from permafrost thaw sites enters the atmosphere and circulates around the globe,” Katey Walter Anthony, an ecologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, told the Associated Press, referencing the recent Siberian heatwave. “Methane that originates in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic. It has global ramifications.”
The record temps, thawing permafrost, and blazing wildfires of the Arctic are all warning signs for the rest of the world. And even though they’re all terrible — and possibly irreversible — we can’t just shrug them off.
Otherwise, we’ll become complacent to the very behavior that’s sinking us deeper into the climate crisis. And if that happens, what we do next won’t matter.