Human caused climate change is having an ever-increasing and profound effect on the Arctic.

From the ocean to the air, warming trends are continuing and air temperatures in the Arctic are rising faster than the global average. 

In 2022, average annual surface air temperatures were the sixth warmest since 1900, with the ten warmest years all occurring since 2011.

Sea ice is thinning — far below conditions that existed thirty years ago, and older ice remains scarce. This loss of sea ice has enabled more shipping through the Bering Strait and Beaufort Sea, bringing with it more human-made debris, increased underwater noise, and the risk of potentially catastrophic incidents such as oil spills. 

All of this activity has wide-reaching impacts on Arctic ecosystems.

Seabirds are natural indicators of the health of marine ecosystems, and in 2022, Bering and Chukchi Sea communities reported the sixth consecutive year of seabird die-offs, most likely due to starvation, and coinciding with the loss of ice in those areas. Prior to 2015, seabird die-offs were rare in Alaskan waters and were usually winter-time events linked to disease outbreaks and above-average ocean temperatures. And both of those factors are projected to increase in coming years.

Rainfall has also been increasing and likely transforming Arctic regions from snowfall to rainfall-dominated climates. In 2022, this was most apparent in eastern Greenland, Svalbard, and northern Norway — and in the central Arctic, with more consecutive wet days generally coinciding with reduced sea ice coverage in warmer months. Extreme weather from heavy rainstorms to drought has become more frequent, and the impacts of these events can be disastrous.

At the peak of an unprecedented September heatwave over Greenland, more than one third of the ice sheet's total surface was melting. A potentially large source of sea level rise is melt from the Greenland ice sheet.

As warmer air and warmer water continue to melt the ice, impacts to ecosystems and communities within and far beyond the Arctic are already underway.

The evidence is clear — human caused climate change is transforming the snowy and icy Arctic into a warmer, wetter environment. To limit these harmful consequences to the Arctic and beyond it is essential for society to reduce greenhouse gasses worldwide.