On Monday, scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado Boulder reported that the Arctic sea ice has shrank to the second-lowest level on record. Satellites recorded a sea ice covering of 3.74 million square kilometres on 15 September, which is only the second time in the past forty years that the ice covering has dropped below 4 million square kilometres.
The record low within the past forty years of record keeping came in 2012, when a late-season cyclonic storm broke up an already depleted layer of ice, leaving only 3.41 million square kilometres. This year’s decline hastened between late August and early September, owing to pulses of warm air from Siberia, which has been in the throes of an unprecedented heatwave.
In July the small town of Verkhoyansk in the Sakha Republic reached a temperature of 38 degrees Celsius (100.4 degrees Fahrenheit), a new record high for the Arctic region. Wildfires raged across Siberia during the summer months, releasing record levels of carbon dioxide as they burned up carbon-rich peatlands. An international team of scientists subsequently concluded that the heatwave would have been ‘almost impossible’ without man-made climate change.
Developments in the Arctic, which is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the globe, cap another damaging year for the environment. 2020 will be one of the hottest years on record, while reduced emissions in the face of the coronavirus pandemic have failed to halt record levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Devastating fire seasons in Australia, California, and the Pantanal region of South America, flooding across Asia, and a major oil spill near Norilsk have destroyed homes, contaminated our air and water, and ravaged animal habitats.
The Living Planet Report 2020 showed that global animal populations declined by an average of 68 percent between 1970 and 2016. Hoping to draw attention to some of these issues – citing burning continents, melting glaciers, and dying coral reefs – on Thursday David Attenborough joined Instagram, besting Jennifer Aniston and setting a new record by reaching 1 million followers in just 4 hours and 44 minutes.
