The ice cover of Lake Superior has reduced since late 1970s, and it is from then, the Lake has been warming even faster than what the climate around it is doing, a new study by professors at the University of Minnesota Duluth reveals.
It is since 1979, the famously cold lake’s surface temperatures of the summer season have increased about 4.5 degrees in comparison to the region’s annual average air temperature of about a 2.7-degree increase, according to the researchers.
Including this change in the overall climate, the ‘summer season’ of the lake presently begins about two weeks earlier compared to what it did 27 years ago.
As reported by The Tribune newspaper, Jay Austin, an assistant professor with the university’s Large Lakes Observatory and Department of Physics said,
It’s a remarkably rapid rate of change.
It is Austin who co-authored the study with geology professor Steve Colman.
According to Austin, the increase in the surface temperature is not only ‘a symptom of climate change,’ but it also could reinforce itself.