From David Myers, Commugny, Switzerland
It isn’t only in the Antarctic that temperatures have gone crazy. At the end of August, my wife and I visited Svalbard, well inside the Arctic circle, where temperatures would normally be 4°C to 11°C (39°F to 52°F) in the summer, and were told that it had been up to 20°C (68°F). We travelled to the far north, where we found valleys whose glaciers had entirely melted. The walruses seemed very happy to lie in the sun, though (12 October, p 15).
We then crossed the Arctic Ocean and spent some time visiting the fjords in eastern Greenland, where I was surprised that a lot of ground is entirely snow-free to a significant altitude.
