Siberian Arctic records off-the-charts warming

June 2020 tied for the planet’s warmest June on record, closely matching the anomalously toasty temperatures observed globally during June last year. But one region in particular saw heat virtually off the charts – Siberia.

Uncharacteristically warm weather thawed vast stretches of the Arctic, contributing to a flareup in wildfires and melting away permafrost in a process set to accelerate the pace of humaninduced climate change.

It was Siberia’s hottest June on record, beating the previous record holders, 2018 and 2019, by a significant margin, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service, a science division of the European Union.

Across the entirety of Arctic Siberia, June temperatures averaged about 1.2 degrees C above normal. A few places bordering the Laptev Sea in northeast Siberia spent the month 8C above normal.

The town of Verkhoyansk reached 38C on the afternoon of June 20. The World Meteorological Organisation has preliminarily accepted the reading as legitimate, making it the hottest temperature ever observed in the Arctic.

Climate scientists have long concerned themselves with Siberia and the Arctic, zones that are outpacing almost everywhere else in the world when it comes to climate warming by a factor of almost three.

Less ice in the Arctic means there is less ice to reflect sunlight, allowing the surface to absorb more of the sun’s rays and heat up disproportionately faster than the rest of the world.

That’s also triggering the same positive feedback mechanism on land, by melting Siberia’s snowpack and even thawing its previously untouched permafrost.

Scientists with the climate monitoring service Copernicus reported a record minimum in snowpack across Siberia during June, increasing the region’s ability to heat up.