It Was 100 Degrees Near the Arctic Circle on Saturday

Last week saw four straight days of record high temperatures. Over the weekend, yet more heat records were being set in Canada's Northwest Territories, which are experiencing what the BBC calls an "unprecedented" heat wave. Saturday's temperature of 37.4 degrees Celsius (99.3 Fahrenheit) in Fort Good Hope was "the hottest temperature recorded that far north in Canada," a meteorologist says. It was even hotter (37.9C/100.2F) in the community just south of Fort Good Hope, which was only 0.1C lower than the hottest it's ever been near or just north of the Arctic Ocean, the Washington Post reports. (That would be Verkhoyansk, at a similar latitude in Russia, where a heat record was set in 2020.)

Meanwhile, Canada's historically bad wildfire season continues, with 639 active fires currently and 351 of those burning out of control, and experts say the heat will continue. "Each summer is just getting hotter and hotter," the meteorologist says. "These temperature records aren't just sneaking by," but rather are sometimes smashing previous records "often by several degrees." More than 2.7 million acres in British Columbia have burned this year so far, compared to the average annual amount of a million acres—and wildfire season is far from over. (More Canada stories.)