According to the Siberian Times, parts of the expansive region are up to 62.6 degrees warmer than usual; the anomalies are enormous. The Siberian Times report that there has been no snow resulting in a drought that has now seen a vast expanse in the Magadan region ignite with high winds blowing embers for miles across the tundra in the normally bitter-cold and snow-covered area.
Some plants have become confused with the relentless warm weather that some flowers are blooming today, while strawberry patches which should be hibernating, have flowered and have berries that are beginning to ripen.
Roman Vilfand, director of the Russian Hydrometeorological Center, is quoted as "very warm weather, simply huge anomalies of up to 14-17C (57.2F to 62.6F) degrees are expected in Krasnoyarsk region, the west of Yakutia and Magadan region at the beginning of next week. The streams of warm air from the south and west determine this situation. This is an amazing situation".
The arctic is in a death spiral, temperatures are warming three times fast than the rest of the planet. Since we are unable to refreeze the polar ice caps, we have no other option, but to adapt.
Meanwhile pictures show the vivid colours of plants at the Sayano-Shushenskiy Biosphere Reserve, that until now would not be blossoming in October or November.
They are a delight to see, but give quite a warning of changing weather patterns as Cop2e6 is underway in Scotland.
‘For some plants, blooming in the autumn has become almost common - for example, Ledebour's Rhododendron now blooms almost annually in autumn.
‘But for others it is not at all common. Seven plants and flowers that were never seen blooming in Autumn gave us flowers in the middle of October.
‘Two - Kuvaev’s Poppy and Turchaninov’s pasqueflower - are especially interesting, as they bloom early in April and May, and again this was the first autumn on record that they were blooming’, the reserve's representative in Central Siberia said.
There have been other impacts, too.
Magadan region in the Far East of Russia has seen unseasonal November wildfires; usually unthinkable, but the lack of snow had left the tundra - starved of precipitation - vulnerable to flames especially with high winds.
A weather map shows the abnormally warm air temperature in Western Siberia where traditionally air cools to at least minus 15C at the beginning of November.
Residents of Sakhalin, Russia's largest island took to social media to share their surprise over blossoming flowers and ripening strawberry.
Meanwhile, in Greenland, which holds 20 feet of sea-level rise frozen in miles thick ice, new tools based entirely on satellite data have opened a unique window into how much melt and the location of extreme melt is now quantified. The analysis is critical to monitor sea-level rise as it now threatens more calamity than previously predicted. We now know that basal melt in the center of the ice stream and at the bedrock, comprises 8 percent of all water entering the ocean from Greenland meltwater.
Although it is one of the most studied places on Earth by climatologists, Monday's research is the first to use satellite data to detect Greenland ice sheet runoff.
Writing in the journal Nature Communications, researchers said that Greenland's meltwater runoff had risen by 21 percent over the past four decades.
More strikingly, the data provided by the European Space Agency showed that the ice sheet had lost 3.5 trillion tonnes of ice since 2011, producing enough water to raise oceans globally and put coastal communities at higher risk of flood events.
One-third of the ice lost in the past decade came in just two hot summers—2012 and 2019—the research showed.
The images showed significant annual variation in ice melt and, combined with temperature data, showed that heatwaves were increasingly a major cause of ice loss—above and beyond global temperature rises.
For those technically inclined, from PROMICE:
It's clear to everyone, that the Greenland Ice Sheet is melting, but exactly how much? And by exactly which processes? The Programme for Monitoring the Greenland Ice Sheet (PROMICE) has the answer with updates now coming in near real time. The team behind PROMICE just published an updated model offering the latest update on the mass balance of the Ice Sheet including new data and observations. All of which is described in a paper recently published in Earth System Science Data.
"As our climate warms, it's reasonable to expect that the instances of extreme melting in Greenland will happen more often."
Predicting how much Greenland's melt will contribute to rising sea levels is notoriously tricky for scientists who also need to factor in the potential rise caused by other land-based glacier melt.
And, as oceans warm, water expands, and also contributes to higher seas.
The U.S. East Coast has been experiencing hurricane-like flooding in recent days, with Georgia and the Carolinas getting the latest round. High tides are part of the problem, but there’s another risk that has been slowly creeping up: sea level rise.
Since 1880, average global sea levels have risen by more than 8 inches (23 centimeters), and the rate has been accelerating with climate change.
Depending on how well countries reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in the coming years, scientists estimate that global sea levels could rise by an additional 2 feet by the end of this century. The higher seas means when storm surges and high tides arrive, they add to an already higher water level. In some areas – including Charleston, South Carolina, where an offshore storm and high tide raised water levels 8.4 feet on Nov. 6, 2021 – sinking land is making the impact even worse.
Two reasons why the east coast is getting hammered.
Climate change, fueled by fossil fuel use and other human activities, is causing average global surface temperatures to rise. This is leading the ocean to absorb more heat than it did before the industrial era began. That, in turn, is causing ocean thermal expansion.
Thermal expansion simply means that as the ocean heats up, sea water molecules move slightly farther apart. The farther apart the molecules are, the more space they take up.
The other major factor in rising sea levels is that the increase in average global temperatures is melting land ice – glaciers and polar ice sheets – at a faster rate than natural systems can replace it.
Cryosphere scientists and activists pressure COP 26 to mandate a Cryosphere Dialogue at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Bonn next year.
The National Snow and Ice Data Center press release:
“For too long, our planet’s frozen elements have been absent from the climate debate at the UNFCCC, even though their crucial role in determining the future for more than a billion people and our climate is becoming ever more clear,” said Dr. Martin Sommerkorn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate author, of the WWF Arctic Programme. “The UNFCCC must urgently create space for Parties and stakeholders to discuss actions to be taken in response to this cryosphere crisis.”
The groups note that despite the dire consequences noted in the IPCC’s latest report, released in August of this year, there has never been a full discussion of projected changes, especially their irreversibility at the climate talks. The UNFCCC has in the past held Dialogues on oceans and terrestrial systems or lands; but never on the Earth’s cryosphere.
“Negotiators may think they know about melting ice caps, but what they don’t realize is that the impacts are essentially permanent on human timescales, and catastrophic for humanity,” noted Dr. Robert DeConto, a leading researcher with one of the groups, the Scientific Committee for Antarctic Research (SCAR) who attended the conference last week. “Once the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet begins, it will be effectively impossible to halt,” agrees Jonathan Bamber, Director of the Bristol Glaciology Centre and a multiple IPCC author who also attended.
Dr Rachael Treharne from Woodwell Climate Research Center explained, “Thawing Arctic permafrost makes carbon that has been locked in the deep-freeze for millennia vulnerable to release into the atmosphere. It's critical that international mitigation policies address this catastrophic regional and global hazard.”