14 DAY TRIAL // Researchers with the University of Colorado Boulder say that, according to their investigations, average summer temperatures in the Eastern Canadian Arctic have reached their highest levels in 44,000 years.
More precisely, they argue that the Eastern Canadian Arctic presently gets hotter during the summertime than it did during the Early Holocene, which happens to be a period in our planet's history when 9% more of the sun's energy reached this region than it does today.
Study leader Gifford Miller and his colleagues believe that this warming of the Eastern Canadian Arctic has very little to do with natural variability.
On the contrary, it appears that high concentrations of greenhouse gases in our planet's atmosphere are to blame.
“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,” Professor Gifford Miller says, as cited by Daily Mail.
The researchers concluded that said region is now considerably warmer than it used to be over the past 44,000 years after analyzing clumps of dead moss and gas bubbles trapped in local ice.
Thus, the dead moss and the gas bubbles allowed them to date various snow and ice layers in the region, and reconstruct past temperatures.