Title: Yukon’s climate, notoriously cold in Gold Rush days, is transforming - Anchorage Daily News
Headings: Yukon’s climate, notoriously cold in Gold Rush days, is transforming
Yukon’s climate, notoriously cold in Gold Rush days, is transforming
After Interior Alaska fire, permafrost disappears
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Yereth Rosen
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Content: "Talk of your cold! through the parka's fold/ It stabbed like a driven nail," the Bard of the Yukon wrote in a poem that told the tale of a Gold Rush miner who got warm only when his corpse was cremated. But by the end of this century, expect the Yukon to feel less like the Arctic and more like the northern Rocky Mountain and prairie regions, according to a new study that examines "cliomes," the term used to describe localized climates that support distinct habitats. Of 17 existing Yukon cliomes, seven will probably disappear by 2100, and one new one — favorable to prairie grasslands — will spread from the south, according to the study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Global Ecology and Conservation. Northern Yukon, where the changes are expected to be most dramatic, will no longer have climate conditions that favor arctic tundra, according to the study. In the mountains of northern and central Yukon, the climate will favor boreal forests instead of alpine tundra now found there. In the southern part of the territory, the climate will become more like that found in the prairies of Saskatchewan and Manitoba. "It doesn't mean we're going to be planting canola soon, but it does mean that we're going to see a disconnect with the ecosystem and the climate," said Nancy Fresco of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, a co-author of the study. A lag occurs between the arrival of a new climate and the spread of new types of vegetation and other features that match the climate and make up an ecosystem, said Fresco, coordinator of UAF's Scenarios Network for Alaska and Arctic Planning program (SNAP). The triangle-shaped Canadian territory of the Yukon runs from thick forests of spruce, pine and aspen in its southeast corner to the Arctic Ocean shoreline on the north.