Due to climate change, Arctic winters are getting warmer. An international study by UZH researchers shows that Arctic warming causes temperature anomalies and cold damage thousands of kilometers away in East Asia.
Due to climate change, Arctic winters are getting warmer. An international study by UZH researchers shows that Arctic warming causes temperature anomalies and cold damage thousands of kilometers away in East Asia. This in turn leads to reduced vegetation growth, later blossoming, smaller harvests and reduced CO2 absorption by the forests in the region.
Switzerland has had relatively little snow so far this winter, but last year was different: Trains and trams stopped running, and tree branches broke under the heavy weight of the snow. During the past few days, the east coast of the United States experienced heavy snowfall and low temperatures as far south as Florida.
Warmer Arctic winters are now also triggering extreme winter weather of this kind in East Asia, an international team of researchers from Switzerland, Korea, China, Japan and the United Kingdom has found. The cooler southern winters reduce vegetation activity in the evergreen subtropics, and continue to negatively affect ecosystems in the spring, for example due to branches broken under heavy snowfall or frost-damaged leaves. First author Jin-Soo Kim of the Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies at the University of Zurich says: “The cooler winters also reduce agricultural productivity of cereals, fruits, root vegetables, and legumes.”
Read more at: University of Zurich
Melting ice on the islands of Severnaya Zemlya (Barents and Laptev Sea region). (Photo Credit: Gabriela Schaepman-Strub, Arctic Century Expedition, 2021)
