Alert, in northern Canada, temperatures reached 21 degrees: it had never happened before. Meanwhile, Alaska and Siberia are being ravaged by wildfires.
Alert, in Canada, is just 817 kilometres from the North Pole. It is the northernmost inhabited settlement in the world: around sixty people live there, according to the last census of 2016. The sea is usually covered by pack ice, a layer of floating ice. From mid-October to late February the sun does not appear on the horizon. "Actually it's not that terrible: we're not the only workers who go into the office in winter when it's still dark and leave when it's already dark," jokes Byron Felske, who lived in the small town for a year.
Described like this, Alert does not seem a very welcoming place. And yet, on Sunday 14 July the temperature reached 21 degrees: such a high temperature had never been recorded there before. This was confirmed by Environment Canada, the Canadian government department responsible for the environment and climate change.
Not even Victoria, a city famous for its mild temperatures, was that warm that day. Alert is experiencing an unprecedented heatwave, caused by a flow of warm air from the south feeding a high-pressure system over Greenland — the very place where a pack of sled dogs was photographed running through water rather than over ice.
Across the Arctic, the summer is proving particularly hot. "According to our models, this is something we have to get used to. And we cannot deny that part of the responsibility lies with global warming," explains David Phillips, climatologist at Environment Canada.
Alaska — where for the first time the temperature exceeded 30 degrees on 4 July — and Siberia are literally burning. Over the past six weeks, more than a hundred fires have been detected within the Arctic Circle, by Noaa and by the European Union's Earth observation programme. According to the World Meteorological Organization, this is "an unprecedented event," which has already caused the emission into the atmosphere of the same amount of CO2 that Sweden produces in a year.
