Arctic Summers May be Ice Free Sooner: New Research Reveals Unprecedented Temperatures

Get ready for an ice free summer in the Arctic. New research has revealed that the warmest summers in the last two decades were unprecedented in six centuries.

The study examined statistical models of Arctic temperatures and how they related to instrumental and proxy records. These models gave a large ensemble of equally likely temperature histories for the past 600 years, as opposed to the best estimate provided by most other reconstructions of the planet's temperature. After sorting through the many plausible temperature histories, the researchers made some surprising discoveries.

"It becomes possible to find the probability associated with a great variety of relevant quantities, such as whether the 2010 Russian heat wave was more anomalous than all other events or whether the trend in average temperature over the last 100 years is uniquely large," said Peter Huybers, one of the researchers, in a press release.

They found that Arctic summer temperatures, including the years 2005, 2007, 2010 and 2011, were each warmer than all of the years prior to 2005. In addition, they found that the rate of temperature increase observed over the last century is greater in magnitude than centennial trends in the last 600 years. It seems that temperatures are on the rise, and they're not going down any time soon.

Yet the researchers also found that while summer temperatures are on the rise, there's no indication that temperature variability has changed. That means extreme events, such as the 2010 Russian heat wave, are consistent with the increase in mean temperature.

"These results suggest that the hottest summers will track along with increases in mean temperature," said Martin Tingley, one of the researchers, in a press release. "If instead the distribution of temperatures were becoming wider, as well as shifting toward higher values, then the probability of extreme events would go up even more rapidly." Essentially, as temperatures become warmer, extreme temperatures become more likely. This could mean that places vulnerable to warming, such as the Arctic, could experience major changes in the coming years.

The study was published in the journal Nature.