Our planet is in the grip of rapid climate change. Explore how your city has already changed.

Peter Aldhous / BuzzFeed News / Via data.giss.nasa.gov Use the search box or click on the map to see how the average annual temperature has changed at that location. The colored overlay shows average temperatures from 2004 to 2018, compared to the average from 1951 to 1980. Darker orange and red areas have warmed the most.

This March was the warmest on record in Alaska. For communities that depend on ice for everything from getting their supplies trucked in to their leisure activities, that’s posed serious problems. And for Jan and Amber Westlake, a couple in their thirties from the village of Noatak, and their 11-year-old niece Alexandria Howarth, it led to disaster. At 1:08 a.m. local time on April 15, the Alaska State Troopers received a call from the local search and rescue coordinator. A snowmobile ridden by Amber and Alexandria had gone through the ice on the Noatak River, a few miles south of the village. Jan reportedly died trying to save his wife and niece. This tragedy, one of several similar incidents in the past few weeks, was part of a wider pattern of disruption, as ice roads on frozen rivers that in winter serve as the main transport arteries for the state’s remote communities have started to melt weeks ahead of schedule. Native Alaskan seal hunters have been unable to take to the sea ice. Sled dog races have been canceled for a lack a snow. “This winter, particularly in February and March, Alaska hit what I would call the unlucky jackpot,” Brian Brettschneider, a climate scientist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks’s International Arctic Research Center, told BuzzFeed News. The Arctic as a whole has been unusually warm, he added, “but the center of the bull's-eye was over Alaska.” We often think of climate change as a distant threat — something for future generations to worry about. But as the map above shows, almost everywhere on the planet has warmed noticeably since the middle of last century. Click on the map or use the search box to see how global warming has affected that location. Search for Noatak, and you’ll see that its location in northwest Alaska is one of the fastest-warming places on Earth. The regions swathed in red and deep orange show that the planet’s far North has borne the brunt of global warming. And in places where an increase in temperature just a couple of degrees means the difference between water being solid or liquid, the consequences are severe. Across much of the Arctic, towns and cities are built on permafrost, a layer of frozen soil beneath the surface that never thaws — or at least, it previously didn't. Buildings and roads that were built on frozen ground as strong as bedrock are now cracking and shifting as the permafrost turns to mush. Some 60% of buildings in Norilsk, an industrial city of 175,000 people in the heart of Siberia, have already been damaged. The Arctic Ocean is also undergoing a drastic transformation. Its crust of sea ice naturally grows and shrinks with the seasons, peaking in March and reaching its annual low in September. But since the late 1970s, when the daily extent of the ice first came under the gaze of orbiting satellites, the ice has steadily been shrinking. Thanks to this year’s unusually warm Arctic spring, right now the ice is at its lowest-ever recorded level for the time of year.

Tap to play or pause GIF Tap to play or pause GIF Peter Aldhous / BuzzFeed News / Via nsidc.org

Getty Images Clockwise from top left: A woman sits on the front porch of her home surrounded by floodwater, March 22, 2019, in Craig, Missouri; Pakistani commuters cross a flooded street in Karachi, Jan. 21, 2019; a member of the Portland Department of Public Works Water Resources Division stands in a flooded street in Portland, Maine, at high tide Friday, March 22, 2019; people wade through floodwater in Bandung, Indonesia, April 17, 2019.

Peter Aldhous / BuzzFeed News / Via French Space Agency/NASA/U. Colorado Sea Level Research Group The colored overlay shows average sea level from 2008–2010, compared to the average from 1993–1995. Darker blues indicate greater sea level rise.

On average, sea level is rising by about 3 millimeters per year, but there is a lot of variation from place to place, due in part to the interaction of currents and coastal geography, as well as variations in gravitational pull. Near the Philippines, sea level is rising at five times the global average rate.

Last November, BuzzFeed News highlighted the locations on the US coast likely to face regular flooding from rising seas by the time a new homeowner has paid off their mortgage. But even now, some coastal cities are getting flooded by the highest tides even in the absence of storms. Adapting to this new reality is expensive. Miami Beach in South Florida, for instance, is spending $500 million on a plan to install pumps to remove water from low-lying areas and to raise roads and sidewalks above the waves. With other pressing demands on their budgets, cities don’t spend megabucks to fight a “hoax.” Climate change is happening now, it’s changing lives and taking lives, and it’s costing us billions of dollars. Zahra Hirji contributed reporting to this story.