A new study concludes that winter snowfall in Alaska has more than doubled since 1840

We have seen a huge change in the global climate since the beginning of the industrial revolution in 1840, but one of the effects that we might not have expected at first was that Alaska would get more snow! However strange it might sound, it is actually true, and a paper with this new information was just published in Scientific Reports.

The study finds that summer snowfall has had a 49 % increase, while winter snowfall has had a 117 % increase since the mid-19th century. The samples were taken in south-central Alaska, and they are describing a pretty clear pattern of increased snowfall.

More snow might seem really strange, especially when you begin to think about the climate change, and how it is heating up the environment. Alaska has actually got a 2-3 degree increased average temperature in the last 50 years already, but contrary to what many thinks, this actually do make sense. With hotter weather, the air is more humid, allowing it to store more water. This water is eventually released as snow when the clouds are cooled down over mainland Alaska, so increasing temperatures means more snowfall, or rainfall for those of us who live in warmer regions.

But the increased humidity is not enough to explain a doubling in winter snowfall

Despite increased temperatures leading to increased precipitation and snowfall, it’s still not enough to explain a doubling in the winter snowfall in Alaska. 3 degrees increased average temperature is a lot, but not enough to do this kind of damage. In order to find the answer to this, the scientists looked to the western Pacific and Indian oceans.

What happens at these two oceans is that they are also getting warmer, which eventually leads to warm, moist air that rise up into the upper atmosphere. Here it will travel away from the oceans, and eventually a lot of it ends up in Alaska. This air is perfect for creating a huge amount of snow, and this is the leading theory as to why the snowfall has increased by such a huge amount.

How the scientists determined how much snow Alaska usually get

There was obviously no one to measure the snowfall in Alaska back in 1840 or even before that, so in order to figure out the normal amount of snowfall Alaska would get, the scientists had to be a little creative. What they did was to travel close to Mount Hunter in Denali National Park. This peak has snow all year long, and is a perfect place to take an ice core sample. This ice core is kind of layered, so the scientists could use this to see how much snow would fall on any giver year, as far back as 1,200 years ago! What they found out is that the snowfall was pretty stable until 1840, and had a steady rise from there on out.

Mount Hunter. Image by Nomdeploom, posted with the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Thanks for reading

This is a really good example of how only a few degrees increase can have huge effects on certain parts of the world, and we will most likely see more stories like this one as we keep increasing the temperature in the atmosphere. It also means that some places have already faced huge consequences from these climate change, and it might be too late to ever reverse them in our lifetime, but it’s not too late to stop us from increase the temperature even higher! I won’t use this post to talk about how or why we should stop burning fossil fuels, but if you are interested, then have a look at some of my previous posts, because I’ve written about it many times before.

Thanks for reading this post by the way. I hope you enjoyed it, despite the fact that this is pretty bad news. I linked to my sources in the text above, so click on one of those if you want a closer look at the paper.