'Doomsday vault' town warming faster than any other on Earth
'Doomsday vault' town warming faster than any other on Earth
By Sarah Lazarus, CNN
Updated 1:50 AM ET, Wed March 27, 2019
"CNN In 2014, Mark Sabbatini noticed cracks in his apartment walls. Then a mysterious bulge appeared in his bedroom and the apartment block's communal staircase became crooked. "Doors and windows weren't shutting properly," he says.
Sabbatini, the editor of a local newspaper, was living in Longyearbyen, the world's northernmost town located just 800 miles from the North Pole, which is also the capital of a cluster of Norwegian islands called Svalbard."
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"Inger Hanssen-Bauer, senior researcher at the Norwegian Meteorological Institute and editor of a new report about Svalbard, says the climate in Longyearbyen is probably warming faster than in any other town on Earth. That's because of accelerated Arctic warming -- as rising temperatures reduce ice and snow cover, less sunlight is reflected and more solar energy is absorbed by the darker surfaces that have been exposed."
According to Hanssen-Bauer, the annual mean temperature in Longybearbyen in 1900 was -7.8°C. Since then, it has risen by 3.7°C -- more than three times the global average of around 1°C. The town increasingly experiences days when the temperature exceeds zero. "All the projections show that this will continue," she says."
This is all starting to remind me of THX1138, and it's all happening a few centuries early.
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