It should be a winter wonderland; instead, it's just piles of slush. British holidaymakers travelling to Lapland for a pre-Christmas holiday got a shock when they arrived in Santa's traditional home this week: no snow.
Rovaniemi, a town on the Arctic Circle in northern Finland which is the Lapp capital, is normally covered in deep drifts at this time of the year, with accompanying temperatures going down to -20C.
But this week it has been completely snow-free and temperatures have been up to three degrees above freezing. As a result, disappointed families hoping to go on husky and reindeer sleigh rides, as part of increasingly-popular Father Christmas package tours, have found excursions cancelled, and they have had to make do with slush at best.
A spokesman for First Choice holidays, the British tour operator that takes thousands of Britons to Lapland, said yesterday that the conditions were "incredibly unusual". However, they have occurred in the week that US scientists warned that the Arctic region is now warming so fast that all the ice in the Arctic ocean, which covers the North Pole, could melt away in as little as 35 years - meaning extinction for polar bears, which depend on the floating ice to hunt.
Ever since I first learned of what is happening to the polar bears, I experienced enormous pain about that reality. It grieves me to think of them drowning and starving because there are no ice floes. They must be so confused on top of the obvious suffering. Their plight is simply heart-breaking.
No comments:
Post a Comment
New policy: Anonymous posts must be signed or they will be deleted. Pick a name, any name (it could be Paperclip or Doorknob), but identify yourself in some way. Thank you.