The effects of climate change are catastrophic, and this is what the world is experiencing nowadays in the form of global warming. Due to this pressing issue, the overall temperature of the Earth is on the rise, and the most prevalent effect can be seen in the Arctic Ocean, which is warming up to four times faster than the usual predictions. A new study has been released that has made shocking revelations about climate change and stated that the warming of the Arctic Ocean is a cause of concern for the world as the situation is continuously worsening.
To clearly assess the situation, climate change researchers have collected data from NASA and the Met Office from 1979 to 2021 to get an idea of the situation. The findings deduced from the research study have shocked the researchers and have become a cause of major headaches as the paper stated that the Arctic is warming up at the rate of 1.35 degrees Fahrenheit per decade. This means that the temperature rise is four times faster as compared to the total average during this period.
This phenomenon is known as “Arctic amplification,” and the two main causes of this issue are “human activities and the long-term variations in climate.” Researchers at the Finnish Meteorological Institute conducted this study, which was then published in the journal “Communications Earth & Environment”. In this paper, the researchers wrote,
“In recent decades, the warming in the Arctic has been much faster than in the rest of the world, a phenomenon known as Arctic amplification. Numerous studies report that the Arctic is warming either twice, more than twice, or even three times as fast as the globe on average. Here we show, by using several observational datasets which cover the Arctic region, that during the last 43 years the Arctic has been warming nearly four times faster than the globe, which is a higher ratio than generally reported in the literature. “
Similarly, the study’s author, Mika Rantanen, a researcher at the Finnish Meteorological Institute, said, “The Arctic was defined using the Arctic Circle because we wanted to use an area that most people perceive as the Arctic. We focused on a period that began in 1979 because the observations after that year are more reliable and because strong warming began in the 1970s. ” Given this, this prevailing condition of adverse climate change in the Arctic Ocean would be disturbing not only for the wildlife living there but also for human beings in the rest of the world.
All the previous models that showed an expected increase in temperature in the Arctic Ocean were two times less than what we are witnessing today. Those were “underestimated” results, as per the researchers. The team said, “Our results call for a more detailed investigation of the mechanisms behind AA [Arctic amplification] and their representation in climate models.”
