-
Study says Arctic currently warmest in over 7,500 years
The Arctic has never been as warm in the last 7,500 years as it is today, a study published on Thursday (August 25) in the journal Nature Communications declared.
The analysis of tree rings, in which the Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) and the University of Geneva participated, shows the extent of climate change.
The researchers led more than twenty expeditions on the Yamal Peninsula, in the Russian Arctic, for forty years to collect samples.
They unearthed more than 3,500 subfossil tree trunks in stream beds in this region, 2,500 km northeast of Moscow, indicates Thursday the WSL in a press release.
More than 1400 of them were used to establish a tree-ring chronology. This work allows us to go back to 5618 BC. The width of the tree rings directly reflects summer temperatures, which strongly determine the annual growth of trees in the region.
During the entire period studied, temperatures in the Arctic have never been so high as in the past 30 years, writes the WSL. Yet the climate was still steadily cooling until the middle of the 19th century. Since the Industrial Revolution, warming has exceeded all natural variations.
The scientists took sections of tree trunks and put them out to dry.
Climate change: Driest months in 40 years trigger drought in Wales
“Our results are an exceptional Source for highlighting, to the nearest year, the abnormal speed of warming that the peninsula has experienced since 1850, and which today reaches temperatures unprecedented in the last 7500 years”, explains Patrick Fonti, dendrochronologist at WSL.
“These data help us put the magnitude of the current warming into a long-term perspective,” added the expert, quoted in the press release.
Source: trenddetail
