Ongoing Climatic Changes in the Eurasian Arctic: Why They Force Us to be Expedient in Our Research

The need to be expedient in our research in the Eurasian Arctic climatic and environmental changes comes from two reasons. Firstly, the changes in this part of the globe have been already among the largest over the globe and are accelerating. Secondly, we are facing a non-linearity in environmental and climatic changes in the Northern Eurasia Arctic right now due to dramatic retreat of the Arctic sea ice and feedbacks to the global carbon budget and climate due to near-continental changes in seasonal snow cover characteristics, changes in the fresh water inflow into the Arctic Ocean, permafrost thaw, wetland transformation, land cover changes and ecosystems shift. Presentation will illustrate these two statements supporting and/or substantiating them with a foci on climatic and environment changes that have already been observed and extreme events (previously unobserved and/or rarely observed) that have occurred more frequently in the past few decades. An overview of research efforts conducted in the framework of the Northern Eurasia Earth Science Partnership Initiative (NEESPI) at high latitudes of the NEESPI domain (north of 60N) will conclude the talk.