Historic heat wave is roasting Siberia
MOSCOW >> They used to ride snowmobiles in June in Russkoye Ustye, a Siberian village by the Arctic Ocean coast. Last week, the temperature in the area hit 88 degrees.
“Nature is taking its revenge on us, probably,” Sergei Portnyagin, the village head, said by telephone. “We’ve been too bloody in how we’ve treated it.”
The climate has been warming rapidly in the Arctic for years, but even by those standards, a heat wave roasting northern Siberia for the past few weeks has been shocking.
Wildfires are spreading. The fishing is meager, the mosquitoes ravenous. People are nailing their windows shut with foil and blankets, seeking refuge from the midnight sun.
The town of Verkhoyansk, more than 400 miles farther north than Anchorage, Alaska, topped 100 degrees Fahrenheit last Saturday, possibly the hottest temperature ever recorded above the Arctic Circle.
Verkhoyansk had been best known as a place of exile in czarist Russia and for sharing the Northern Hemisphere’s cold temperature record — 90 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, set in 1892. Even before the current heat wave, climate change has been transforming life in Russia’s northern reaches, with global implications.
“Very strange things are happening here,” said Roman Desyatkin, a scientist based in the Siberian city of Yakutsk who studies perhaps the most farreaching consequence of the region’s warming climate — the thawing of its frozen ground. “Our plants, our animals and our people are not used to such great heat.”
The frozen ground, or permafrost, lies just below the surface across much of Russia — as well as swaths of Alaska, Canada and Scandinavia. In some areas, including parts of northeastern Siberia, the permafrost contains large chunks of ice. With every hot Arctic summer, more of it thaws, flooding pastures, twisting roads, destabilizing buildings and eroding riverbanks.
The thawing permafrost has global consequences because it results in the release of greenhouse gases from the decomposition of organic material that had long been frozen. A group of scientists convened by the United Nations said last year that the process could unleash as much as 240 billion tons of carbon by 2100, potentially accelerating climate change.
For Russia, the warmer climate brings some benefits. Officials hope the receding sea ice will spur greater trade by ships crossing between Asia and Europe via the Arctic Ocean, and will further ease access to oil and gas under the sea.
But it comes at a cost: Addressing the damage to Russian buildings and infrastructure caused by thawing permafrost alone could total more than $100 billion by 2050, scientists estimated last year.
The Arctic has been heating more than twice as fast as the rest of the world, and annual temperatures in the region from 2016 to 2019 were the highest on record. But this year may be hotter.
Temperatures in Siberia were 18.5 degrees Fahrenheit above average in May, the World Meteorological Organization said, “driving the warmest May on record for Northern Hemisphere and indeed the globe.”