An international team of researchers has found that rapid warming in northern latitudes has resulted in a decline in temperature seasonality -- the difference between summer and winter temperatures -- which in turn has shifted growing seasons in the region. "Results show temperature and vegetation growth at northern latitudes now resemble those found 4 degrees to 6 degrees of latitude farther south as recently as 1982," says NASA in a press release today (10 March 2013). "This landscape resembles what was found 250 to 430 miles (400 to 700 kilometers) to the south in 1982," the agency explains. "It's like Winnipeg, Manitoba, moving to Minneapolis-Saint Paul in only 30 years," said co-author Compton Tucker of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "The global implications of these large shifts in a region covering a fifth of our planet cannot be understated," says Martin Sommerkorn Head of Conservation for WWF's Global Arctic Programme.
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