As the "Beast from the East" covers Europe in snow, the Arctic Circle is experiencing "unprecedented" warmth, The Washington Post reports.
Temperatures in London and Rome dropped below freezing this week, down to 23 degrees Fahrenheit in Britain on Wednesday, while northern Greenland only hit 43 degrees.
"It's never been this warm. It's really, really unprecedented, I would say," climate scientist Ruth Mottram from the Danish Meteorological Institute, told German news network DW.
"It's really quite remarkable for February, when it's dark permanently," she added. "It's never been this high at this time of year."
Although the Arctic has seen occasional warm temperatures in the winter, they're occurred much more often than usual in recent years.
"These events are not unusual, but they are happening more frequently and with longer durations," climate scientist Robert Graham of the Norwegian Polar Institute told the American Geophysical Union.
A recent study conducted by Graham and other researchers found that warm Arctic winters may be connected to major storms.
"The warming events and storms are in effect one and the same," he added. "The more storms we have, the more warming events, the more days with temperatures greater than minus 10 degrees Celsius rather than below minus 30 degrees Celsius, and the warmer the mean winter temperature is."
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