Already dealing with ice melt brought on by warming water temperatures, the Arctic is also warming up in the air.
According to Discovery News, the researchers presented their findings at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco.
From Oct. 2014 to Sept. 2015, the Arctic's average air temperature was 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit greater than the average set from 1981 to 2010. Since the beginning of the 20th century, the Arctic's average temperature climbed 5.2 degrees Fahrenheit, doubling the rate of the rest of the globe.
"This new haul-out behavior is raising concerns about the well-being of females and their young that must now have to make 110-mile feeding trips, each direction... rather than just simply going to nearby ice edges as they did in the past," Kit Kovacs, a researcher at the Norwegian Polar Institute who contributed to the 10th annual Arctic Report Card, told reporters at the conference. "Given consistent projections of continued warming temperatures, we can expect to see continued widespread and sustained change throughout the Arctic environmental system."
Warming waters in the Arctic is causing ice to melt faster, raise sea levels, and is decreasing the amount of ice added during the colder seasons. Warming in the arctic is also having an adverse affect on wildlife like polar bears and the prey they hunt.
"We're looking at, depending on where in the Arctic, a two- to four-year consistent drop in vegetation. It's something that's actually just gotten on our radar from a terrestrial ecology perspective," Live Science quoted Howard Epstein, an environmental scientist at the University of Virginia, saying at the conference. "If you increase vegetation on the landscape, it tends to have a protective effect on the permafrost."
