In 2021, precisely 7,278 lightning strikes were recorded above the 80th parallel, that is, north of the northernmost tip of Greenland. The data is from the annual report published by Vaisala, a Finnish environmental monitoring company.
This number represents twice the lightning strikes that have occurred in this region over the past eight years, according to the report’s authors. The spectacular increase must be put into perspective, as “just a few storms can produce several hundred lightning strikes,” explains Sander Veraverbeke, a climatologist at the Free University of Amsterdam and one of the first scientists to take an interest in lightning in the Arctic region.
However, the simple fact that these electrical discharges are happening further and further to the north of the planet is, for a growing number of scientists, a worrying sign of the acceleration of global warming.
A glimpse of what’s to come
The increase in arctic lightning “is actually an important indicator of accelerating global warming,” notes Declan Finney, a climatologist at the Ronin Research Institute in New Jersey. “We are talking about what we consider to be tropical events and which are occurring more and more frequently in the Arctic”, explains the expert.
In 2002, scientists interviewed residents of the arctic region of northern Canada and “no one had seen more than a handful of lightning in their life. One of the older men had seen only one storm seventy years earlier,” according to a report in the National Geographic Channel.
For there to be lightning in the sky followed by thunder during a storm, a very specific cocktail of elements is needed: high humidity, heat at the surface, cooler temperatures at high altitudes, and unstable weather. These elements, until then, were not common to be found in the vicinity of the North Pole, but that has changed.
This ocean region has always had a lot of moisture, but for a long time low surface temperatures were not conducive to lightning strikes, says Sander Veraverbeke. The reality is no longer this. “There is no doubt that the increase in the number of lightning in the Arctic is a phenomenon attributable to global warming”, adds the expert.
It’s also “a warning of things to come elsewhere,” says Declan Finney, referring to an increase in the number of storms, increasingly stronger around the world. Temperatures in the Arctic are rising much faster than in the rest of the planet and thus serve as a warning of the environmental upheaval that will come as a result of global warming.
Storms are estimated to be more frequent and violent on the coast of temperate climate areas — characteristic, for example, of southern Brazil and part of the state of São Paulo.
When the North catches fire
However, the increase in lightning in the far north brings another risk: fires. In this sparsely populated part of the world, it is not humans who start forest fires, but almost always lightning.
“When you talk about Alaska or Siberia, or even further north, fires aren’t the first thing that comes to mind, but there were record numbers of arctic fires in 2019 and 2020,” says Sander Veraverbeke. , which specifically works on the interaction between climate and fires.
These fires are a big problem for the climate, as the northern tundra areas store huge amounts of carbon. “The fires in these regions are very dangerous for the climate because the organic soil that burns there releases much more carbon per square meter than the soil in temperate zones”, says Veraverbeke.
With that, a true vicious circle begins: the climate crisis causes the temperatures to rise in the Arctic, which leads to more storms and lightning, which leads to more fires, which in turn causes the advance of global warming.
Not to mention the time bomb called permafrost. According to the expert from the Free University of Amsterdam, as this gigantic “carbon and methane cooler” thaws, it releases into the atmosphere the greenhouse gases that it traps under a layer of perpetually frozen land, almost 1,600 billion tons of carbon.
Scientists still don’t know how much fire and global warming will accelerate the release of carbon from permafrost into the atmosphere. “That’s one of the big questions that worry scientists,” says Declan Finney. The more lightning strikes in the Arctic, the more urgent it becomes “to understand the effect of fires on permafrost.”
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