Press release from July 29th, 2010

Signs of reversal of Arctic cooling in some areas

- new data indicate rapid temperature rise in the coldest
region of mainland Europe

Moscow/Stuttgart/ Halle(Saale). Parts of the Arctic have cooled clearly over the past century, but temperatures have been rising steeply since 1990 also there. This is the finding of a summer temperature reconstruction for the past 400 years produced on the base of tree rings from regions beyond the Arctic Circle. German and Russian researchers analysed tree growth using ring width of pine from Russia’s Kola Peninsula and compared their findings with similar studies from other parts of the Arctic. For the past 400 years since AD 1600, the reconstructed summer temperature on Kola in the months of July and August has varied between 10.4 °C (1709) and 14.7 °C (1957), with a mean of 12.2 °C. Afterwards, after a cooling phase, a ongoing warming can be observed from 1990 onwards. Researchers from the Institute of Geography in Moscow, Hohenheim University and the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) report in journal Arctic, Antarctic and Alpine Research: “The data indicate that solar activity may have been one of the major driving factors of summer temperatures, but this has been overlaid by other factors since 1990”.

View on Kunjok valley in the North of Khibiny Mountains (Kola Peninsula, NW-Russia)

View on Kunjok valley in the North of Khibiny Mountains (Kola Peninsula, NW-Russia)
Photo: Michael Friedrich (Institute of Botany, University of Hohenheim)

download als jpg (1,4 MB)

Yuri Kononov (Institute of Geography RAS, Moscow) and Michael Friedrich (Institute of Botany, University of Hohenheim, Stuttgart) during the tree sampling in Khibiny Mountains (Kola Peninsula,NW-Russia)

Yuri Kononov (Institute of Geography RAS, Moscow) and Michael Friedrich (Institute of Botany, University of Hohenheim, Stuttgart) during the tree sampling in Khibiny Mountains (Kola Peninsula,NW-Russia)
Photo: Michael Friedrich (Institute of Botany, University of Hohenheim)

download als jpg (1,0 MB)

Visualisierung des Mittelwertes der rekonstruierten Lufttemperatur für Juli-August mittels eines Diagramms

Reconstructed mean July-August temperatures for the last 400 years.
Illustration: Stephan Boehme/UFZ

download als jpg (0,3 MB)

Terms of use

The researchers used for this study wood samples from a total of 69 Scots pines (Pinus sylvestris) from the Khibiny Mountains on the Kola Peninsula, situated between the Arctic Circle and the ocean port of Murmansk, not far from the Finnish border. The investigated region is a transition zone between Scandinavia, which is strongly affected by the gulf stream resp. North Atlantic Current, and the continental regions Eurasia. This makes the region particularly interesting for climatological studies.

Kola has a cold-temperate climate with long, moderately cold winters and cool, humid summers. In this part of the Arctic, the mean temperature fluctuates between -12 °C in January and +13 °C in July, with a growing season of just 60 to 80 days. The northern taiga vegetation is dominated by spruce, pine and birch. The samples came from three locations in the Khibiny Mountains close to recent altitudinal timberline at altitudes of between 250 and 450 m above sea level. The geographical northern timberline lies approximately 100 km further north. In earlier studies, researchers led by Tatjana Böttger from the UFZ were able to show that pine forests on the Kola Peninsula expanded between 7000 and 3500 years ago to about 50 km north of their present-day limit. However, for this study, they used trees from the altitudinal timberline, since they respond very sensitively to temperature fluctuations and provide particularly useful information, as demonstrated by US researchers in November 2009 in the journal PNAS when they used a long-lived species of pine in California and Nevada to show that these trees had grown particularly fast over the last 50 of the past 3500 years because of higher temperatures.

In the Tree-Ring-Laboratory at the University of Hohenheim in Stuttgart the German researchers measured the width of the individual tree rings. The calibration of these data with the help of meteorological records for the last 127 years and the interpretation of results occurred together with Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow and the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Halle. “Besides of temperature, growth is also strongly influenced by non-climatic factors like light, nutrients, water supply and competition from other trees. So it is vital to isolate these trends to obtain a climate signal as pure as possible,” explains Yury M. Kononov from the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow.

Following the summer temperature reconstruction on the Kola Peninsula, the researchers compared their results with similar tree-ring studies from Swedish Lapland and from the Yamal and Taimyr Peninsulas in Russian Siberia, which had been published in Holocene in 2002. The reconstructed summer temperatures of the last four centuries from Lapland and the Kola and Taimyr Peninsulas are similar in that all three data series display a temperature peak in the middle of the twentieth century, followed by a cooling of one or two degrees. Only the data series from the Yamal Peninsula differed, reaching its peak later, around 1990. What stands out in the data from the Kola Peninsula is that the highest temperatures were found in the period around 1935 and 1955, and that by 1990 the curve had fallen to the 1870 level, which corresponds to the start of the Industrial Age. Since 1990, however, temperatures have increased again evidently. What is conspicuous about the new data is that the reconstructed minimum temperatures coincide exactly with times of low solar activity. The researchers therefore assume that in the past, solar activity was a significant factor contributing to summer temperature fluctuations in the Arctic. However, this correlation is only visible until 1970, after which time other – possibly regional – factors gain the upper hand. “One thing is certain: this part of the Arctic warmed up after the end of the Little Ice Age around 250 years ago, cooled down from the middle of the last century and has been warming up again since 1990,” says Dr Tatjana Böttger, a paleoclimatologist at the UFZ.

In September 2009, another international team presented model calculations showing that the Arctic had gradually cooled down by around 0.2 °C per thousand years over the last two millennia to the start of the Industrial Age. They attributed this to a gradual decline in solar radiation in the summer. However, the last decade was the warmest of the Common Era and was 1.4 °C above the forecasts, report Darrell S. Kaufman and his colleagues in Science. The new data produced by Kononov, Friedrich and Böttger support the thesis that solar activity seems to be a significant factor influencing summer temperatures in the Arctic, but that its influence has weakened considerably over the past few decades.
Tilo Arnhold Tilo Arnhold

With its expertise, the UFZ plays a part in researching the consequences of climate change and in developing adaptation strategies. You can find more on this in the special issue of the UFZ newsletter entitled “On the case of climate change” at
/export/data/2/78627_ufz_newsletter_dez09.pdf.

Publication:

Yu. M. Kononov, M. Friedrich and T. Boettger (2009): Regional Summer Temperature Reconstruction in the Khibiny Low Mountains (Kola Peninsula, NW Russia) by Means of Tree-ring Width during the Last Four Centuries Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research, Vol. 41, No. 4, 2009, pp. 460–468

DOI: 10.1657/1938-4246-41.4.460

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Weitere fachliche Informationen:

Dr. Tatjana Böttger (DE+RU+EN), Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ)
Phone: +49 345 / 558 5227

Dr. Yury M. Kononov (RU+EN), Russian Academy of Sciences
Phone: +49 345 / 558 5405
Weblink

Michael Friedrich (Dipl. agr. biol.) (DE+EN), University of Hohenheim
Phone: +49 711 / 459 22196 or -22188
Weblink

and

Dr. Stephan Weise (DE+EN), Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ)
Phone: +49 345 / 558 5435
http://www.ufz.de/index.php?de=4371

or from

Tilo Arnhold (UFZ press office)
Phone: +49 341 / 235 1635
Email: presse@ufz.de

Related Links:

Comparing climatic trends across space and through time (UFZ Magazine 12, 2006)
/export/data/2/78628_UFZ_XII_FT12_Klimaentwicklg.pdf

Paleoclimate research at the UFZ:
http://www.ufz.de/index.php?de=17015
http://www.ufz.de/index.php?de=1699

Rapid pine growth (DE):
Weblink

Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris):
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References:

Matthew W. Salzer, Malcolm K. Hughes, Andrew G. Bunn, and Kurt F. Kipfmueller (2009): Recent unprecedented tree-ring growth in bristlecone pine at the highest elevations and possible causes. PNAS:
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Kaufman, Darrell S. et al. (2009): Recent Warming Reverses Long-Term Arctic Cooling. Science 325, 1236:
Weblink

Boettger, T., Hiller, A., and Kremenetski, C. (2003): Mid-Holocene warming in north-west Kola Peninsula, Russia: northern pine limit movement and stable isotope evidence. Holocene, 13: 405–412:
Weblink

Grudd, H., Briffa, K. R., Karlén, W., Bartholin, T.S., Jones, P.D. and Kromer, B., 2002: A 7400-year tree chronology in northern Swedish Lapland: natural climatic variability expressed on annual to millennial timescales. Holocene, 12: 657-666:
Weblink

Hantemirov, R. M., and Shiyatov, S. G., 2002: A continuous multimillennial ring-width chronology in Yamal, northwestern Siberia. Holocene, 12: 717–726:
http://www.nosams.whoi.edu/PDFs/papers/Holocene_v12a.pdf

Naurzbaev, M. M., Vaganov, E. A., Sidorova, O. V., and Schweingruber, F. H., 2002: Summer temperatures in eastern Taimyr inferred from a 2427-year late-Holocene tree-ring chronology and earlier floating series. Holocene, 12: 727–736:
Weblink

At the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) scientists research the causes and consequences of far-reaching environmental changes. They study water resources, biological diversity, the consequences of climate change and adaptation possibilities, environmental and biotechnologies, bio energy, the behaviour of chemicals in the environment and their effect on health, as well as modelling and social science issues. Their guiding research principle is supporting the sustainable use of natural resources and helping to secure these basic requirements of life over the long term under the influence of global change. The UFZ employs 930 people at its sites in Leipzig, Halle and Magdeburg. It is funded by the German government and by the states of Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt.

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Founded in 1846 under the name of Royal Saxonian Society for the Sciences, the Saxonian Academy of Sciences in Leipzig (SAW), like its sister institutions, is rooted in the idea of the academy formed by Leibniz to unite "theoriam cum praxi". More than 200 scientists of all disciplines meet regularly to exchange views, examine methods and results of specialist studies in interdisciplinary discussion and engage in long-term basic research.