The arrival of August in the Arctic usually indicates that autumn, with its waning daylight and cold weather, is soon to return.
But on a recent afternoon, Sandy Gordon and her four children dove into the muddy waters of the CanadaThe Mackenzie River escapes the scorching heat wave that has hit the town of Inuvik.
“We love it when it’s nice and warm,” she said. “It’s so nice to have a real summer.”
The seasons change quickly in the north and for locals summer is a brief respite from months of bitter cold. But a heat wave currently hanging over the community, 209 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle, threatens to break the all-time heat record.
While the warmth brings joy, it also brings some lingering concerns, including the threat of wildfires and melting permafrost, leading some to wonder if the increasingly balmy temperatures are coming at too high a cost.
On Wednesday, just past the northernmost traffic lights in North America, a digital thermometer slowly climbed, eventually reaching 35C (95F) – breaking a record of 33C set last year. Families left the NorthMart convenience store with boxes of popsicles and ice cream in their hands. A weather alert from Environment Canada classified the heat as “severe” and warned of a “significant threat to life or property.”
The unusually warm temperatures mark the fourth heat wave of the season. While some dream of escaping work and jumping into nearby lakes and rivers, others are not happy.
“Winter really sucks. I hate it,” Kamdyn Alexie said. “But at the same time, the mid-30s heat isn’t that great either.”
Unlike more southern cities, where the hottest temperatures peak in the late afternoon, a midnight sunset in Inuvik means the heat lingers well into the evening, offering little relief. The city is surrounded by forest, but the spruce and pine trees are dwarfed by other regions and offer little shade. Also, the community, which sits at more than 1,000 feet (305 meters) of permafrost, was not built with heat waves in mind.
The recent heat wave has compounded what residents are calling a difficult summer. Inuvik, located in a drainage channel of the Mackenzie River, has been struggling with low water levels due to prolonged droughts in British Columbia and Alberta, which feed the mighty river. Barges carrying food and supplies have been unable to navigate the waterways that connect the northern outposts.
Alexie described a recent visit to Hay River, a community nearly 800 miles from Inuvik, where drought-like conditions had turned a popular park into a “terrifyingly ugly” spectacle, with vegetation growing in places that were normally under water.
For Gordon’s children, who waded through the river, the warmth was a welcome relief from the months of dark, freezing winter, when temperatures dropped to as low as -56 degrees Celsius.
“We’ve been here 10 times this year. It’s not often that we’re here in August,” she said. “But I do worry about wildfires if it gets this hot and stays that hot.”
In recent years, record-breaking wildfire seasons in Canada have enveloped a region of the country that has historically been spared from widespread devastation. And with the trend of warmer temperatures and prolonged periods of dry weather expected to continue in Canada’s north, the risk of more frequent and intense wildfire seasons has also increased.
Last year, major fires broke out in the Northwest Territories, forcing three-quarters of residents to leave their homes.
At one point, a fire raged less than eight miles from Inuvik.
“We were all a little tense, waiting to hear whether we should pack a bag and run. We had just explored Yellowknife, the capital of the territory, evacuate and we didn’t know if we were next,” said Deputy Mayor Natasha Kulikowski. “The sense of fear and panic was huge. And with this heat and the fires that have happened so recently, it’s hard to completely forget that feeling.”
Related: ‘Just like Nagasaki’: Devastating wildfires will only get worse, new book warns
This week, more than half of the territory was faced with an “extreme” fire risk, according to the Canadian Wildfire Information System.
Research in recent years has shown that Canada is warming faster than the global average, and the Arctic is warming even faster.
The increased warming in the northern latitudes is not yet fully understood, but scientists say Glacier retreat and sea ice loss both contribute to a warming feedback loop, a major contributing factor to Canada’s disproportionate temperature increase.
“As someone who loves warmth, I’m so happy that the weather is nice and I’m outside. But the other day, when I was picking berries, I could hear and feel the ground cracking under my feet because it’s so dry,” Kulikowski said. “And so when I look at it from a broader environmental perspective, it’s hard to come to any other conclusion than this: It’s devastating.”
