It has not been a good summer for the Arctic.

Perhaps more than anywhere on Earth, the Arctic has felt most acutely the effects of climate change — evidence of which is unfolding in real time as residents and wildlife contend with a mess not of their own making.

While Europeans baked under a few sweltering days in June and July, Arctic residents faced an altogether different paradigm.

A changing Arctic brings problems foreign to those in the south: The inability to travel, the struggle to secure nutritious food, the arrival of new species, the loss of others, and perhaps most damaging, the potential disappearance of one’s culture.

“The people in the North are the most affected from the impact of climate change,” said Mishak Allurut, a community leader in Arctic Bay, Nunavut. “Their whole livelihood revolves around the environment.

Here is a look at how the Arctic and some of its people fared over the past three months while being subjected to some of the hottest weather on record.

Mercury Rising

Parts of the Arctic felt more like Ontario cottage country this summer as the world experienced its hottest June followed by scorching temperatures in July, making it the hottest month since record keeping began in 1880.

Multiple records were smashed in Alert, Nunavut, the northernmost permanent community on Earth. Temperatures hit a record 21 degrees on July 14, breaking the previous record of 20 degrees set in 1956.

“This is an example of what we’re seeing across the entire planet, which are a lot of records being broken, particularly in the maximum temperatures,” said Armel Castellan, a meteorologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada.

The heat refused to let up in Alert as the temperature hit 20.3 degrees on July 15, breaking the previous record of 15.7 degrees for that day set in 1971. The next day, July 16, reached 17.8 degrees to tie the record for that day set back in 2015.

August turned out to be the warmest August on record in Alert by more than one degree, with an average temperature of 4.3 degrees, according to weather watcher Patrick Duplessis, an atmospheric science PhD student at Dalhousie University.

“Beating a monthly average temperature record by a whole degree is quite impressive, especially in summer months, where variability is small,” Duplessis said.

To the south, in Nunavut’s capital Iqaluit, the temperature hit 22.7 degrees on June 28, setting a record for that month, while July 9 – Nunavut Day – was a balmy 23.4 degrees, breaking the previous record of 22.2 degrees set in 1969.

The story was much the same internationally. On July 26, Sweden recorded 34.8 degrees in the village of Markusvinsa, setting that country’s record for the highest temperature inside the Arctic Circle. The next day, the municipality of Saltdal, Norway, saw the mercury hit 34.6 degrees, also the highest temperature ever recorded inside the Arctic Circle in that country.

Alaska recorded its hottest month on record in July, with an average temperature of 14.5 degrees, beating the previous warmest month of July 2004.

Rick Thoman, a climate scientist at the Alaska Centre for Climate Assessment and Policy, said what’s happening in the Arctic “is a preview of things to come for those south of the Arctic. Temperature is on an escalator “going up,” he said. “With the combination of very warm oceans, low sea ice, we loaded the dice and then the atmosphere co-operated by giving us the third piece of the puzzle to push it up yet again.”

On Thin Ice

Earlier this year, Mishak Allurut and some other hunters traveled about 100 kilometres south from their homes in Arctic Bay, Nunavut, to fish for Arctic char, an important food source for the Inuit.

The fish migrate downstream from freshwater to the sea in the spring, so hunters set up their nets on the edge of the ice where the rivers flow into the ocean. One of Allurut’s fellow hunters lost his nets after they slipped into the water when the ice on which they were set melted in just a matter of hours.

“Usually it takes three or four days to have an open area, but this time it took only one,” said Allurut, co-ordinator of the Inuit stewards who manage the waters around Arctic Bay as part of the Nauttiqsuqtiit Tallurutiup Imanga program. Tallurutiup Imanga is a national marine conservation area established this summer around Lancaster Sound in northeastern Nunavut.

“We have to travel on ice to and from our harvesting areas, so, because the ice was melting fast I was worried about travelling back to the community.”

The dangerous ice conditions also meant that his community could harvest just one narwhal this summer; normally they would bring in 20 to 30, he said.

Arctic sea ice coverage reached record or near-record lows this summer. June saw the second-smallest average sea ice coverage for that month, and was also the 20th consecutive June with coverage below average, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

July was worse, with sea ice coverage nearly 20 per cent below the 1981-2010 average, marking the lowest coverage in that month ever recorded.

Loss of ice coverage in August slowed but in some areas, such as the Beaufort and Laptev seas, coverage was more diffuse, with open water between ice floes.

“You’ve got a blue ocean now that you didn’t have before. We’ve never seen anything like this before,” said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Boulder, Colorado.

Unusually, Alaskan waters in the Beaufort Sea were completely clear of sea ice by the first week of August, with the nearest ice about 240 kilometres northeast of Kaktovik, a small coastal city at the top of the state. While ice has been that far from shore before, climate scientist Thoman noted that such a change isn’t expected until much later in the season.

“The main thing about this year is it happened so early,” Thoman said.

Sea ice coverage in the western Canadian Arctic in the last week of August was the fourth-lowest for that week on record since 1981, while coverage in the eastern Canadian Arctic for the same week was the second-lowest on record.

Median ice coverage in the eastern Arctic has historically been around 17 per cent at the end of August.

“Now we’re down to five,” said Gilles Langis, a senior ice forecaster with the Meteorological Service of Canada. “If you compare all the last weeks of August from a historical standpoint, 2011 was the lowest. 2019 was trending very close to that.”

A lack of sea ice contributes to a reduction in the amount of energy from the sun that can be reflected back into space – a process known as the albedo effect, explained Langis. The lighter the surface, the more energy reflected; the darker the surface, the more energy absorbed. “The dark exposed water has a tendency to accelerate the melt in that area because it’s absorbing more incoming radiation,” said Langis.

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Fire Alarm

Huge swaths of land across the Arctic were scorched by wildfires unprecedented in their intensity and duration. Clouds of thick smoke and soot fouled the air and blanketed cities in Russia and Alaska.

More than 100 “intense and long-lived” wildfires in the Arctic Circle have been tracked by the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service since the beginning of June. Alaska alone saw more than 690 fires that burned more than a million hectares. In June, fires in Siberia, Alaska, Canada and Greenland released 50 megatonnes of carbon dioxide — equivalent to Sweden’s total annual fossil fuel emissions, according to Mark Parrington, a senior scientist with the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.

Parrington said this level of emissions was “way above anything we’ve seen in June for the Arctic Circle.” He noted that scientists normally expect to see some fires during summer, but the cluster of fires that started in Siberia in early June was “quite unusual.”

By mid-August, Siberian wildfire smoke covered more than five million square kilometres — an area larger than the European Union, according to the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization.

The fires have made life particularly uncomfortable for Alaska residents who had to contend with hot, thick, billowing smoke.

“Houses in Alaska, like everywhere in the North, are designed to keep heat in,” said Thoman of the Alaska climate assessment centre. “So when it’s smoky...do you keep the windows closed to keep your air quality better in the house? But then over the course of several days, your house gets warmer and warmer. Or do you let that cooler morning air in and let the smoke in? It becomes kind of a Catch-22.”

Sander Veraverbeke, a forest fire expert at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, said the increasingly warm weather in the Arctic has resulted in more dry vegetation that is susceptible to lightning strikes, which increase in warmer weather. Climate warming also results in what he calls the “shrubification of the Arctic” – increased vegetation that provides more fuel for fires.

In August, several lightning strikes were recorded within 480 kilometres of the North Pole, a rare occurrence that has raised concerns about the amount of heat and moisture in an area that is usually cold and dry.

Wildlife

On the northwest coast of Alaska thousands of walruses, unable to find floating sea ice on which to tend to their young, are crowding onto land.

The walruses, mostly females and dependent young, gathered in late July on the shores of a barrier island close to Point Lay, an Inupiat village on the Chukchi Sea coast. Ice cover on the Chukchi Sea was the lowest ever for that month, according to the International Arctic Research Centre at the University of Alaska.

While walruses have come ashore at Point Lay in recent years, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service spokesperson Andrea Medeiros said previously large numbers of the marine mammal had not been reported there until early August.

“Walruses are easily disturbed by unusual sights, sounds and odours when hauled out on land,” said Medeiros. “A disturbance can cause the walruses to stampede into the water and result in injuries or the deaths of animals.”

Scientists are baffled by a spike in strandings of gray whales in the Chukchi and Bering seas and farther south along the west coast. In what the NOAA is calling an “Unusual Mortality Event,” 208 gray whales washed up along the coasts of Mexico, U.S. and Canada this year, including 40 in Alaska and 10 in British Columbia. Between 2000 and 2018, the average number of annual gray whale strandings was about 12.

After giving birth in Mexican waters during the winter, gray whales migrate north during summer to feed in the Arctic. According to the NOAA, many of the whales stranded this year were skinny and malnourished.

Kate Savage, a veterinarian and biologist with NOAA Fisheries in Juneau, Alaska, said scientists don’t yet know why the whales are dying. An international team is trying to figure out what’s going on, she said, adding that four necropsies have been completed in Alaska, but the results aren’t in yet.

She said that while animals that depend on the Bering Sea and the Arctic for their survival will likely be impacted by climate change, the deaths of the gray whales have not been been linked to climate change or any other cause.

Greenland is Melting

In late July, a mass of warm air from Africa delivered record-breaking temperatures to Europe, including the U.K., Germany, and the Netherlands. It then travelled northwest to Greenland’s ice sheet where it caused what NASA called a “major melting event” that saw billions of tonnes of ice melt and stream into the Atlantic Ocean.

On July 31, Greenland lost more than 10 billion tonnes of ice from surface melt with 56 per cent of the ice sheet experiencing at least one millimetre of melt at the surface, according to Polar Portal, a website run by Danish research institutions.

About 80 per cent of the island’s surface is covered by the ice sheet.

For July as a whole, the island had a net loss of 197 billion tonnes of ice, which contributed to half a millimetre of sea level rise, according to scientists at the Danish Meteorological Institute.

The trend continued with more than 10 billion tonnes lost on each of the first two days of August. Martin Stendel, a climate scientist with the Institute, noted on Twitter that the amount of ice that melted from the surface of the ice sheet on July 31 and Aug. 1 “would be enough to cover Florida with almost five inches of water.”

On July 30 and 31, temperatures at Summit Station, a research camp at the top of Greenland’s ice sheet (3,216 metres above sea level), rose to above freezing.

“This was the first time that we know there were back-to-back days of melting at Summit Station,” said Christopher Shuman, a glaciologist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He said temperatures remained above freezing for 11 hours on the 30th and about five-and-a-half hours the next day.

“It is not a good sign for an ice sheet that is clearly out of balance.”

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