Arctic Temperatures Highest In At Least 44,000 Years; Researchers Say "We Expect All Of The Ice Caps To Disappear, Even If There Is No Additional Warming"

The Arctic is melting drastically, scientists have reported.

New research shows that average summer temperatures in the Canadian Arctic over the last century are the highest in the last 44,000 years, and perhaps the highest in 120,000 years.

"The key piece here is just how unprecedented the warming of Arctic Canada is," Gifford Miller, a researcher at the University of Colorado, Boulder, said in a joint statement from the school and the publisher of the journal Geophysical Researcher Letters. Miller's study was published in the journal this week. "This study really says the warming we are seeing is outside any kind of known natural variability, and it has to be due to increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere."

While studies have shown the Arctic is warming, the new findings are more severe than past studies.

The research is highly concerning to many who are worried about climate change.

. "All of Baffin Island is melting, and we expect all of the ice caps to eventually disappear, even if there is no additional warming," Miller said.

The study is the first study that definitively shows that that current Arctic temperatures even exceed peak heat in the early Holocene. The Holocene is the name for the current geological period, which began about 11,700 years ago.

The study found that during this "peak" Arctic warmth, solar radiation was about 9 percent greater than today-but today is still warmer.

"The Arctic has been getting warmer for about a century, but the most significant warming didn't begin until as late as the 1970s, Miller said. "And it is really in the past 20 years that the warming signal from that region has been just stunning," he added

The study was conducted by looking at gas bubbles trapped in ice cores in the region, which allow researchers to measure past tempaertaure and precipitation levels.

Researchers then compared this data with radiocarbon data of clumps of moss from an ice cap in Canada's Baffin Island.  The moss clumps have been trapped in the ice for at least 44,000 years, and possibly as long as 120,000 years. Thus, the data, once compiled, shows that temperatures in the Arctic region haven't been this high since about 120,000 years ago, according to the study.