Arctic warming threatens wider world with rising seas

Svalbard, The Gulf Observer: The Arctic experienced the warmest summer on record this year, contributing to extraordinary wildfires and melting glaciers while threatening the rest of the world with problems including higher sea levels, a U.S. report said on Tuesday.

Summer surface air temperatures in the Arctic were the highest since at least 1900 as the Arctic continues to warm twice as fast as the rest of the globe because of human-caused climate change, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) 2023 Arctic Report Card, Reuters reported.

The annual report showed more frequent extreme weather and climate events with global impact.

Warming across parts of northern Canada and the Canadian Arctic Archipelago coincided with below-normal precipitation over those areas, contributing to an extreme wildfire season there.

Greenland lost another 350 trillion pounds (158.7 billion metric tons) of mass from its ice sheet, extending a trend of losing land ice since 1998.