New Evidence Shows Arctic Island Was 5-6°C Warmer 9,000 Years Ago

Zhokhov Island in the Siberian High Arctic today exhibits inhospitably severe climate conditions, desolate tundra, and year-round pack ice in the surrounding sea.

During the Early Holocene, this same island was warm enough to host waterfowl species, birch trees, and year-round human residents who hunted polar bear and reindeer.

I. Zhokhov Island Today: A Frozen Wasteland

The Siberian High Arctic’s Zhokhov Island is today covered in barren tundra. There are no trees or waterfowl.

Even though today’s CO2 concentrations have eclipsed 410 ppm, Zhokhov Island’s summer temperatures may reach just 1° or 2° C above freezing during its warmest month (July).

The island is surrounded by a sea of pack ice year-round, even in summer.

II. Zhokhov Island Early Holocene: Warm, Teeming With Life 

During the Early Holocene, Zhokhov Island was open-seas accessible.

It was teeming with waterfowl species that require 100+ days above freezing to breed successfully.  Non-freezing days may reach only 60 per year today (Makeyev et al., 2003).

Zhokhov Island’s terrain was overlain with birch trees.  The northern limit for birch is today 600 km farther south (Makeyev et al., 2003).

The island’s human inhabitants hunted polar bear and reindeer with blades made of raw materials (obsidian) gleaned from long-distance regional trading networks (Pitulko et al., 2019).

Zhokhov was at least 5 to 6°C warmer than today between 10,000 and 9000 years ago (Makeyev et al., 2003), or when CO2 concentrations hovered around 260 ppm.

III. The Early Holocene Arctic Was 4-7°C Warmer Than Today

Other recently published evidence also affirms that the climate of the Arctic was 4 to 7°C warmer than today about 9000 years ago (McFarlin et al., 2018, Mangerud and Svendsen, 2018).

IV. Modern Arctic Temperatures Haven’t Risen In 80 YearsIn contrast, modern Arctic temperatures are no warmer today than they were in the 1930s.

Greenland was actually much warmer during the 1920s and 1930s than in recent decades.

None of this climatic evidence supports the popularized contention that the Arctic climate is significantly affected by either the atmospheric CO2 concentration or the rise in human emissions.

V. New Paper: Zhokhov Residents Were Long-Distance Traders

Artifacts recovered from an archaeological site on Zhokhov Island indicate that the human populations that lived there between about 8250 and 7800 years ago hunted polar bear in the winter and reindeer year-round.  They used dogsled technology and the blades they used were made of obsidian or volcanic glass.

To procure obsidian, the authors suggest that the people of Zhokhov necessarily needed to travel extensively to trade with those on the Siberian mainland.  The travel distances for the Siberian trade were suggested to reach many hundreds of kilometers.

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