The Arctic is heating up nearly four times faster than the Earth as a whole, according to new research. The findings are a reminder that the people, plants, and animals in polar regions are experiencing rapid, and disastrous, climate change.

Scientists previously estimated that the Arctic is heating up about twice as fast as the globe overall. The new study finds that is a significant underestimate of recent warming. In the last 43 years, the region has warmed 3.8 times faster than the planet as a whole, the authors find.

Over the past four decades the region has been heating up four times faster than the global average, not the two to three times that has commonly been reported. And some parts of the region, notably the Barents Sea north of Norway and Russia, are warming up to seven times faster, they said.

One result of rapid Arctic warming is faster melting of the Greenland ice sheet, which adds to sea-level rise. But the impacts extend far beyond the Arctic, reaching down to influence weather like extreme rainfall and heat waves in North America and elsewhere.

By altering the temperature difference between the North Pole and the Equator, the warming Arctic appears to have affected storm tracks and wind speed in North America.

The study focuses on the period between 1979, when reliable satellite measurements of global temperatures began, and 2021.

“The Arctic is more sensitive to global warming than previously thought,” says Mika Rantanen of the Finnish Meteorological Institute, who is one of the authors of the study published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

The study indicates that the polar region is warming faster than scientists previously estimated in other studies, which have previously said that the Arctic was warming either twice, more than twice or three times as fast as the planet on average.

The study also estimates that other parts of the Arctic — such as sea areas near Novaya Zemlya, Russia, and the Barents Sea north of Norway — are warming seven times as fast as the global average.

“We present evidence that during 1979–2021 the Arctic has been warming nearly four times as fast as the entire globe,” the study stated.

The scientists at the Finnish Meteorological Institute looked at the most recent warming data from the past 42 years, from 1979 to 2021.

They found that across major portions of the Arctic Ocean, warming happened at least four times faster than the global average rate. In some parts of the Arctic Ocean, such as in the Barents Sea, the rate of warming was up to seven times faster. 

Comparing their observed rates of warming to past simulations, the researchers found that the four-fold Arctic warming outcome was extremely rare in the state-of-the-art climate models, which systematically underestimated actual Arctic warming.

In the Arctic, as temperatures rise and ice cover recedes, more heat is absorbed by the ocean, which in turn melts more ice and releases more heat into the atmosphere. 

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