An astonishing new study has discovered something at the North Pole that is amazing scientists, and not in a good way.
As Republicans and Democrats shout back and forth at each other about climate change and global warming, and whether it really exists, scientists have noticed something troubling up at the North Pole. With winter setting in, the temperature is an incredible 36 degrees warmer than normal.
The Arctic is in its dark period where the sun doesn’t rise iin much of the region due to the Earth’s tilt away from the sun. During this time it gets very cold and sea ice covers the Arctic Ocean, thickening even more.
But in 2016, scientists are noticing that the Arctic is actually very warm, and a huge area of polar air is sitting over Siberia instead. So while the ice is still thickening, it’s not doing so at near the pace that it usually does, and the area of ice is lower than it was during the record low of 2012.
“The Arctic warmth is the result of a combination of record-low sea-ice extent for this time of year, probably very thin ice, and plenty of warm/moist air from lower latitudes being driven northward by a very wavy jet stream,” Rutgers University Arctic specialist Jennifer Francis told The Washington Post.
Richard James, a meteorologist who writes a blog on the weather in Alaska, has been tracking 19 weather stations in the Arctic Ocean and have found a huge amount of warm air there in the last couple months.
He wrote: “Looking at recent daily temperature anomalies for the same 19 stations, it is amazing to see that the warmth has become even more pronounced since the end of October; the 19-station mean anomaly reached +9.6°C last Thursday (November 3), and on Friday the coolest of the stations was 5.4°C warmer than normal. In terms of standard deviations, Thursday’s mean anomaly was the highest of any day from 1971-present.”