What they are finding only confirms their fears. While the average global temperature has risen one degree in the past 100 years, in Alaska, Siberia and Northwest Canada it has increased five degrees in just 30 years. While Anchorage saw little snow this winter, other parts of the state had plenty. Yet for the past several years the summers have been longer and drier, melting whatever snow added to the glaciers during the winter and more besides. The western Arctic is warming at a rate approximately three to five times the global average.
Mosquitoes now survive in the polar desert.
Arctic sea ice is an estimated 40 percent thinner and has shrunk in area by 14 percent. Something is happening. Yet, there is more here that just the melt of millennial ice. The beetles are thriving in the new warmer Alaska, their territory spreading, and the vast forest is dying because of it. Scientists estimate that one third to half of all the white spruce in Alaska has been killed in just 15 years.