Current Siberian heating is unprecedented during the past seven millennia

The Arctic is warming faster than any other region on Earth. Putting this rapid warming into perspective is challenging because instrumental records are often short or incomplete in polar regions and precisely-dated temperature proxies with high temporal resolution are largely lacking. Here, we provide this long-term perspective by reconstructing past summer temperature variability at Yamal Peninsula – a hotspot of recent warming – over the past 7638 years using annually resolved tree-ring records. We demonstrate that the recent anthropogenic warming interrupted a multi-millennial cooling trend. We find the industrial-era warming to be unprecedented in rate and to have elevated the summer temperature to levels above those reconstructed for the past seven millennia (in both 30-year mean and the frequency of extreme summers). This is undoubtedly of concern for the natural and human systems that are being impacted by climatic changes that lie outside the envelope of natural climatic variations for this region. © 2022, The Author(s).Natural Environment Research Council, NERC: NE/S015582/1; Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung, SNF: 183571; Russian Foundation for Basic Research, РФФИ: 18-05-00575; Russian Science Foundation, RSF: 182398, 21-14-00330R.M.H., S.G.S., A.Y.S., and L.A.G. received funding from the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (no. 18-05-00575). M.S., C.C., S.G., and P.F. received funding from the SNF Sinergia project CALDERA (no. 183571). V.V.K. acknowledges support from the Russian Science Foundation (no. 21-14-00330). G.vA. acknowledges support from the SNF project XELLCLIM (no. 182398). T.J.O. acknowledges support from UK NERC project GloSAT (no. NE/S015582/1)