Study Shows Arctic Temperatures Reach Highest Levels in 44,000 Years

November 4, 2013- The Huffington Post reports that new research shows the average summer temperatures in the Canadian Arctic over the past century are the highest they’ve been in 44,000 years – and maybe the highest in 120,000 years.

“The key piece here is just how unprecedented the warming of Arctic Canada is,” Gifford Miller, a researcher at the University of Colorado, Boulder, said in a joint statement from the school and the publisher of the journal Geophysical Researcher Letters, in which the study by Miller and his colleagues was published online. “This study really says the warming we are seeing is outside any kind of known natural variability, and it has to be due to increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”

Miller and his colleagues examined gas bubbles trapped in ice cores (cylinders drilled from ice that show layers of snow over time) taken from the region, which allows scientists to reconstruct past temperature. They paired this with radiocarbon dating of clumps of moss taken from a melting ice cap on Canada's Baffin Island. Their analysis shows these plants have been trapped in the ice for at least 44,000 years, and perhaps as long as 120,000 years. Taken together, the data suggest temperatures in the region haven't been this high since perhaps as long as 120,000 years ago, according to the study.

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