Arctic gets warmer

In the past four centuries, the Arctic was at its coldest in 1709, when its average annual air temperature amounted to 10.4 Celsius, and at its warmest, in 1957, when the figure was 14.7 Celsius.

The past two decades were a period of continuous warming, which brought an average temperature increase of 1 and a half degrees.

The conclusions are from a joint study by the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Environmental Studies Centre in Halle in Germany.

The scientists scrutinized cross sections of tree trunks from the Arctic belt of the Kola Peninsula in the north of European Russia.