It hit 100° F in the Arctic Circle this weekend

One of the coldest places on Earth just hit a dangerously high new record.

The Siberian town of Verkhoyansk hit 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit on Saturday, the hottest temperature ever recorded inside the Arctic Circle. That's more than 30 degrees hotter than the small town's average June high of 68 degrees, and just another indicator of how northern climates are rapidly getting hotter.

It's not unusual for the Arctic Circle to experience odd weather patterns and heat waves, but meteorologists have been especially worried about the Arctic Circle's warming temperatures this year, BBC News notes. March, April, and May's average temperatures have been far higher than usual, for far longer than usual.

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Patterns, not just one-off high temperatures, help tie this extreme heat to climate change. While most of the Earth has warmed by an average of 1.44 degrees over the past 40 years, it's been more like 3.5 degrees in the Arctic Circle, Forbes reports. And that just deepens the problem — snow and ice that typically reflects sunlight melts to dark land and rock that draws it in, leading colder climates to warm far faster than warmer ones.