jetcloud

clipped from www.climateark.org

In yet another indication of the abrupt and serious warming occurring in the Arctic, researchers have found that Arctic spring has moved a month earlier in only a decade [more]. "Rising temperatures are causing snow to melt sooner than before, extending the summer period and dramatically disrupting the fragile ecosystem... They recorded a clear shift in the time of year plants came into flower, birds laid their first eggs and insects and other creatures emerged to forage for food." Such patterns in the timing of annual biological and ecological events are called phenology [search], and these dramatic changes in phenology in an extremely short period of time reinforces the fact that something dramatic, awry and scary is happening with the Arctic's climate [search]