Extremely High Summer Temperatures in the High Arctic Stun Researchers

Due to the unprecedented and unexpected warm temperatures that have been recorded in the high Arctic during this past summer, researchers at Queens College, Canada who are working on a climate change project, have decided to completely revise their predictions.

Scott Lamoureux, the leader of an International Polar Year Project and geography professor at Queens states that everything dramatically changed in the watershed that they are watching. This is something that they did not expect to happen for years to come.

Dr. Lamoureux's team is one of 44 Canadian research teams that have received a total of $100 million in funding from the federal government for their new 4 year project that will be conducted on the remote Melville Island in the northwest region of the Arctic. The project will be the collective work of scientists and educators from three Canadian universities and the territory of Nunavut. They are going to study the variance in the amount of water as the climate changes and how those changes affect the water quality as well as the ecosystem sustainability of the plants and animals that depend on it for life.

The researchers feel that this information will be the key to improving models for predicting climate change in the future in the High Arctic. This information is invaluable for the people who live there, especially in how it related to the lakes, rivers and streams that they get their drinking water from.

Last July, in their camp on Melville Island they recorded air temperature over 29 degrees C, which is 68 F, the average temperature in this region in July is 5 degrees C, 41F. The team was shocked when they saw water coming from permafrost that was a full meter below ground melting. It lubricated the top soil which caused it to slide down the slopes, clearing out everything that stood in its path and causing ridges in the bottom of the valley. They could only sit there, powerless to do anything, and watch as the landscape was torn to pieces right before their eyes. A slide caused damage to a major river to the point where the flow of the river will be changed for years or more probably decades.