On thinning ice: musher Nukaaraq Lennert Olsen rides with his sled dogs near Sisimiut in western Greenland
Ina FASSBENDERGreenland's capital Nuuk registered its warmest ever January -- beating a record that stood for 109 years -- as temperatures soared across the Arctic island's west coast, the Danish Meteorological Institute said Monday.
While Europe and North America experienced a cold snap in January, Nuuk registered an average monthly temperature of 0.1C (32 Fahrenheit), a whopping 7.8C above the average for the month of January over the last three decades.
That is 1.4 degrees above the previous record for Nuuk from 1917.
On the warmest day in Nuuk in January, the mercury rose to a balmy 11.3C.
From the southern tip of Greenland up the west coast -- a distance of over 2,000 kilometres (1,243 miles) -– the temperature in January set monthly records, DMI said.
In Ilulissat in Disko Bay, the January average was -1.6C, 1.3 degrees warmer than the previous record from 1929 and 11 degrees warmer than normal for January, DMI said.
Warmer air occasionally sweeps over Greenland, bringing milder temperatures for a day or two, but such an extended heat record across such a large area is "a clear indication that something is changing", DMI climate researcher Martin Olesen said.
"We know and can clearly see that global warming is well underway, which, as expected, leads to more records at the warm end of the temperature scale and gradually fewer records at the low end," he said.
The Arctic region is on the frontline of global warming, heating up four times faster than the rest of the planet since 1979, according to a 2022 study in scientific journal Nature.
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Originally published on doc.afp.com, part of the BLOX Digital Content Exchange.
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