Warming Temperatures Threaten Fragile Balance in Canadian Arctic

Ellesmere Island, Nunavut — It’s August, and there’s snow on the ground. The six-week summer has already passed; our 24-hour daylight will drop to 16 in just a month’s time. Small, brittle leaves crunch underfoot as I walk across tundra that’s already beginning to freeze for the long winter ahead.

The top of the world is a cold place. I’ve been at a field camp here in the Canadian high Arctic gathering climate change data from one of the most remote and isolated regions of the planet. It is barren, wild and beautiful. Yet this place is not beyond the reach of our carbon emissions.

The land up here is warming faster than most of the planet. The 2013Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report projected that the Arctic would warm much more rapidly than the global average, with warming over the land far greater than over the ocean. And it is a particularly sensitive land, where a diverse array of birds, mammals, and plants eke out an existence through eight months of winter while relying on a delicate balance of summer temperatures.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/23/science/warming-temperatures-threaten-fragile-balance-in-canadian-arctic.html