4 ways to put the 100-degree Arctic heat record in context
On June 20, a remote Siberian town called Verkhoyansk logged a temperature of 38° Celsius (100.4° Fahrenheit), likely setting a new high-temperature record for the Arctic Circle (SN: 6/23/20). But that new record didn’t occur in a vacuum: It’s part of a long-term trend of historically hot temperatures in Siberia linked to climate change, and a larger, even more worrisome trend of amplified warming over the last few decades throughout the Arctic region. Here are four things to know about this new Arctic record. Siberia has been sweltering under months of unprecedented warmth. Globally, May 2020 was the hottest May on record, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. Much of that record-breaking heat is the result of warming in Siberia, where May temperatures were as much as 10 degrees C higher than average, says climate scientist Martin Stendel of the Danish Meteorological Institute in Copenhagen. This extreme event in Siberia would...