The Summary
- This was the Arctic s second-hottest year on record, according to a new NOAA report.
- The tundra has become a source of emissions, rather than a carbon sink, the authors said.
- The Arctic is heating up far faster than places at lower altitudes as melting ice reflects less radiation back to space.
It was merely the second-hottest year on record in the Arctic. Concerningly, when permafrost melts and releases methane, the tundra in the area has changed from being a carbon sink to a source of emissions.
This will just increase the quantity of gases that trap heat into the atmosphere, which will lead to additional warming.
In the region of the world where global warming is most severe, the results, which were released Tuesday in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Arctic report card, demonstrate how climate change is upsetting ecosystems and changing the terrain.
Depending on the baselines used for comparison and the terrain included in assessments, the Arctic is warming two to four times faster than locations at lower elevations, making it a bellwether zone for the effects of climate change. The average temperature in the Arctic has been at its highest level since 1900 throughout the last nine years.
Arctic amplification is the phenomenon responsible for that dynamic. More dark-colored ocean water and rock are appearing in the Arctic as sea ice and snow cover melt. Instead of reflecting as much radiation back into space, those dark surfaces absorb heat. Furthermore, heat is increasingly being transported toward the Earth’s poles by patterns of circulation in the atmosphere and oceans.
According to Twila Moon, deputy lead scientist and science communication liaison at the National Snow and Ice Data Center and lead editor of the new NOAA report, taken as a whole, that implies the Arctic is a fundamentally different place than it was just ten years ago.
“The Arctic is in a new regime, which is obviously not a new normal, but it’s a significant change from even a few decades ago,” she said.
According to the paper, the Arctic is generally getting greener, with more intense precipitation and less snow and ice. As melting ice raises sea levels and Arctic fires emit smoke into inhabited regions, the repercussions of that transformation are becoming more noticeable closer to American homes, according to scientists.
Brendan Rogers, an associate scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, who studies permafrost and contributed to the report, stated that these problems are not limited to the Arctic; rather, they are affecting everyone.
A thorough assessment of the Arctic’s altering carbon cycle is included in this year’s study. Researchers have been closely monitoring the melting of permafrost, which releases strong greenhouse gases as it thaws and breaks down.
According to Rogers, there is a significant amount of carbon at risk because the permafrost region has around twice as much carbon as the atmosphere currently contains and roughly three times as much carbon as the aboveground biomass of all trees worldwide.
He continued by saying that, on average, permafrost areas have been carbon sinks for millennia due in significant part to their frozen soils and freezing temperatures. By definition, a carbon sink collects and retains more carbon dioxide than it emits. However, as they thaw and release that carbon and methane into the atmosphere, these areas have now turned into a source of greenhouse gas emissions, according to Rogers.
Arctic emissions are also a result of wildfires. More than twice as much land was burned by wildfires in the region last year as in any other year, surpassing the emissions from Canada’s economic activity.
According to Rogers, the country’s overall wildfire emissions are about three times that of all other Canadian sectors. With the exception of China, the United States, India, and Russia, it surpasses the yearly emissions of every other nation.
Last year, Yellowknife, the capital of Canada’s Northwest Territories, had to be evacuated due to a wildfire. The city, which is located in a location with irregular permafrost, had to evacuate almost 19,000 residents.
The most recent temperature record, which is arranged according to the Arctic water year, took place between October 2023 and September 2024. Scientists take measurements of the Arctic sea ice’s extent at its seasonal minimum each September.
Sea ice extents have dropped by almost 50% since the 1980s, and this year’s was the sixth-lowest in the forty-five years since satellites started taking measurements. More bushes have taken root and spread into new areas, as evidenced by the Arctic tundra being the second-greenest since records began in 2000.
Average temperatures in the Arctic permafrost, measured from subsurface boreholes, were higher than in all but one of the prior years.
“We’re just seeing this consistently extreme and near extreme in a lot of metrics,” Moon added.
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