Arctic Environmental Change of the Last Four Centuries

1997/11/14 by Jonathan T. Overpeck, Konrad A Hughen, Douglas R. Hardy +15 · 16 citations
Earth and Planetary Sciences · #Geology and Paleoclimatology Research #Climate change and permafrost #Tree-ring climate responses #Glacier #Permafrost #Arctic #Arctic ecology #Paleoclimatology #Climate change #Physical geography #Oceanography #Volcano #Global warming #The arctic #Glacial period #Cryosphere #Environmental science #Arctic sea ice decline #Arctic geoengineering #Environmental change #Climatology #Geology #Sea ice #Arctic ice pack #Geography #Antarctic sea ice #Paleontology

paper · doi:10.1126/science.278.5341.1251

openalex publication_date 1997/11/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01

Abstract

A compilation of paleoclimate records from lake sediments, trees, glaciers, and marine sediments provides a view of circum-Arctic environmental variability over the last 400 years. From 1840 to the mid-20th century, the Arctic warmed to the highest temperatures in four centuries. This warming ended the Little Ice Age in the Arctic and has caused retreats of glaciers, melting of permafrost and sea ice, and alteration of terrestrial and lake ecosystems. Although warming, particularly after 1920, was likely caused by increases in atmospheric trace gases, the initiation of the warming in the mid-19th century suggests that increased solar irradiance, decreased volcanic activity, and feedbacks internal to the climate system played roles.

Citations

• Reconstructed Northern Hemisphere annual temperature since 1671 based on high-latitude tree-ring data from North America
• Was there a ?medieval warm period?, and if so, where and when?
• Reconstruction of solar irradiance since 1610: Implications for climate change
• Natural and anthropogenic changes in atmospheric CO2 over the last 1000 years from air in Antarctic ice and firn
• Tree ring width and density evidence of climatic and potential forest change in Alaska
• Decadal Trends in the North Atlantic Oscillation: Regional Temperatures and Precipitation
• Stratospheric loading and optical depth estimates of explosive volcanism over the last 2100 years derived from the Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 ice core

Cited by

• Climate Change Record in Subsurface Temperatures: A Global Perspective
• Seeing the Wood from the Trees
• Recent Warming Reverses Long-Term Arctic Cooling
• Low‐frequency temperature variations from a northern tree ring density network
• Temperature trends over the past five centuries reconstructed from borehole temperatures
• Extra-tropical Northern Hemisphere land temperature variability over the past 1000 years
• Climate reconstruction using ‘Pseudoproxies’
• Borehole climate reconstructions: Spatial structure and hemispheric averages
• On past temperatures and anomalous late‐20th‐century warmth
• Are multiproxy climate reconstructions robust?
• Causes of Climate Change Over the Past 1000 Years
• Proxy-Based Northern Hemisphere Surface Temperature Reconstructions: Sensitivity to Method, Predictor Network, Target Season, and Target Domain
• Proxy climatic and environmental changes of the past 1000 years
• Climate change and greenhouse gases
• Global surface temperatures over the past two millennia
• Hockey stick graph (global temperature) [wikipedia]