Tuesday, January 08, 2008

Is Svalbard quite as extreme as it used to be ?

Svalbard is our extreme environment for Year 10.
It's the middle of winter, so it's really cold there, right ?
Well in fact it's not as cold as it should be...

Thanks to my virtual colleague Richard Allaway for pointing out the article from the TREEHUGGER site.

Apparently, according to the site:

The "normal" early January temperature for the Norwegian Arctic Ocean island of Svalbard is around -14 degrees Celsius. But last Wednesday, Svalbard was the warmest place in all of Norway, with temperatures at the airport a relatively balmy +5.8 degrees. December 2007 was the warmest month on record for all of the region of northern Norway, and in Svalbard 2007's warm temperatures were topped only by...2006.

Perhaps the ominous warmth is one of the reasons Svalbard is pushing itself hard to be CO2-free by 2025. Svalbard has a rich coal industry and is dependent on coal-fired energy, making local scientists eager to test out creation of an underground CO2 storage facility in the town of Longyearbyen.

The photo below is from Laurel McFadden's COLD PHOTO blog.

Picture copyright Laurel McFadden

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow sir, that is worrying. To think that people may not be able to study Svalbard as an "extreme" environment in the future because it has warmed up is quite weird. At least they are trying to do something about it with making Svalbard a CO2-free zone by 2025; though it could be too late by then...
Josh Green, Yr 10

Alan Parkinson said...

Thanks for the comment Josh.
Remember that we will be looking at the ideas of Futures and Sustainability, so that's the F and S of FUGIS...