Global warming is a very real problem, one we're still struggling to control let alone try and reverse.
And if you think it's mostly tropical countries like ours facing the brunt, you're wrong. Because the coldest town in the world just experienced a heat wave.
Images courtesy: Reuters
We're talking about Alert, Nunavut, which is the northernmost permanently inhabited place in the world. Located at the northeastern tip of Canada, it's just 817 km from the North Pole, it usually sees an average temperature of about 5-degrees Celsius during its summer month of July. This time however was different.?
Canada's weather agency confirmed that temperatures in Alert peaked at a whopping 21C over the weekend.
Overnight temperatures this Sunday also remained above 15C, which is again well over the expected nighttime temperature of the area. The previous temperature record for the town was 20C, back in 1956.
And Tuesday's heat wave wasn't an isolated event. Canada says the temperature climbed to 20C on Monday as well, making it the first time the arctic region around Alert has registered record high temperatures two days in a row. Even stranger is that Victoria, which is about 4,000km south of Alert, was actually cooler, registering 20.6C
Environment Canada's chief climatologist, David Phillips, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that the weather was "unprecedented".
And this heat wave in Alert comes less than a month after a similar incident occurred in nearby Alaska. Anchorage, the largest city in the state, experienced a staggeringly high 32C on July 4, topping their previous seasonal high by 8 degrees.
And experts believe these kinds of event will only become more frequent, as the carbon-suffused atmosphere warms, heating up the oceans, and melting the glaciers.
"The Arctic is currently warming two to three times faster than the rest of the globe," said Simon Pendleton, a PhD student at the University of Colorado at Boulder who led a research study on the arctic climate earlier this year.?
So if the North Pole can be hot, can you imagine what we might be in for?