Last week in the beginning of March, we witnessed abnormally freexing cold temperatures here in the UK and almost entire Europe. Excessive snowfall or rather blizzards caused disruption of trains, cancellation of flights and few human deaths too. I, having lived in the UAE for most part of my life, found it really challenging to tolerate. Several inches of snow covered the roads, common alleys and even frozen the garbage bins placed for waste disposal. I clicked few pictures which I am attaching here.  

 

As per Yorkshire Wildlife Trust , there was a 3C drop in sea temperature last week which will have caused animals to hunker down and reduce their activity levels. This makes them vulnerable to rough seas – they became dislodged by large waves and washed ashore when the rough weather kicked in.

The casualties are mostly invertebrates though some fish were also found. Larger animals such as dolphins are more mobile and can save themselves by swimming away when this sort of thing happens. All the organisms piled up on the shores were dead, except some of the lobsters. Yorkshire Wildlife Trust's team worked alongside local fishermen to rescue the surviving lobsters, collecting them in buckets and taking them to tanks in Bridlington. The aim was to put them back in the sea when the weather improves. It's worth saving them so that they can be put back into the sea and continue to breed.

It was really shocking to see such huge scale impact of extreme weather. Planktonic sea life is exquisite and vitally, important. It is the very beginning of the marine food chain.

I agree with what was said by experts from the Wildlife Trusts that we can't prevent natural disasters like this. But we can mitigate against declining marine life and the problems that humans cause by creating enough protected areas at sea and by ensuring that these sites are large enough and close enough to offer fish, crustaceans, dolphins and other marine life the protection they require to withstand natural events such as this.

This unusually cold weather in Europe was actually a displacement of what ought to be happening farther north.  Yes, that's right. As the UK and the wider European continent shivered, the Arctic has witnessed some spectacularly high temperatures in recent days, some 30 degrees above average in places.

 

While Europe was freezing in sub-zero temperatures, on the other hand, Arctic was reported of warming up. What a strange phenomenon!

Spikes in temperature are part of the normal weather patterns – what has been unusual about this event is that it has persisted for so long and that it has been so warm, as per meteorological department in Arctic. Such warming event is unprecedented. Going back to the late 1950s at least, residents have never seen such high temperatures in the high Arctic. Such a topsy-turvy picture inevitably has people wondering if this isn't some kind of fallout from global warming.

An alarming heatwave in the sunless winter Arctic caused blizzards in Europe and forcing scientists to reconsider even their most pessimistic forecasts of climate change.  Scientists are alarmed by 'crazy' temperature rises and Arctic warming. This is an anomaly among anomalies.

Although it could yet prove to be a freak event, the primary concern is that global warming is eroding the polar vortex, the powerful winds that once insulated the frozen north.

The north pole gets no sunlight until March, but an influx of warm air has pushed temperatures in Siberia up by as much as 35C above historical averages this month. Greenland has already experienced 61 hours above freezing in 2018 - more than three times as many hours as in any previous year.

Source: The Guardian