Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin visited the Alexandra Land, one of the Franz Josef Land archipelago islands in Russia’s far north, where he took part in the work of a research expedition studying polar bear habitats and put a satellite collar on a polar bear, the government’s press service said on Thursday.
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A new study exploring the growing worldwide problem of nitrogen pollution from soils to the sea shows that global ratios of nitrogen and carbon in the environment are inexorably linked, a finding that may lead to new strategies to help mitigate regional problems ranging from contaminated waterways to human health.
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The delimitation of the Barents Sea will open up for an unprecedented Norwegian-Russian cooperation on gas field development.
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A report summary from the IPY International Early Career Researcher Symposium is now available at the APECS website.
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Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has ordered that a million abandoned barrels of Soviet-era fuel be removed from the Arctic because they are polluting the environment.
Putin visited the Russian archipelago of Franz Josef Land, 1,000 km (600 miles) from the North Pole, as part of Russia's drive to reassert its presence in the resource-rich region, now opening up to commercial exploration because of melting ice.
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Scientists have discovered that changes in the amount of ice floating in the polar oceans are causing sea levels to rise -- by a mere hair's breadth today, but possibly much more if melting trends continue.
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Priorities for Russia and Canada at present are issues related to investments, the introduction of new technologies and new agro-technical methods in agriculture, Russian First Vice Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov who has ended his working visit to Canada.
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The delimitation of the Barents Sea is a big event not only in Russian-Norwegian relations, but good also for all of Europe, President Dmitry Medvedev said today. He also highlighted the importance of the Barents Euro-Arctic Cooperation in High North relations.
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A deep ocean current with a volume equivalent to 40 Amazon Rivers has been discovered by Japanese and Australian scientists near the Kerguelen plateau, in the Indian Ocean sector of the Southern Ocean, 4,200 kilometres south-west of Perth.
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The ice cover in the Arctic has decreased dramatically in recent years. Norwegian researchers have discovered that changes in air circulation patterns create winds that push away the ice.
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After almost 40 years of negotiations Norway's Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev announced today that they have reached a breakthrough and a deal will be signed.
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A World Wildlife Fund report detailing "serious gaps" in global governance of the Arctic Ocean has the influential environmental group calling for a new international accord to regulate commercial development in the rapidly transforming region.
The WWF study identified numerous "loopholes" in maritime law, pollution regulation, shipping rules, fishing zones and other spheres of activity "that could allow irreparable damage to the marine environment, its biodiversity and Indigenous peoples."
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A Russian scientist says the Arctic may be getting colder, not warmer, which would hamper the international race to discover new mineral fields.
An Arctic cold snap that began in 1998 could last for years, freezing the northern marine passage and making it impassable without icebreaking ships, said Oleg Pokrovsky of the Voeikov Main Geophysical Observatory.
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Warming temperatures are melting patches of ice that have been in place for thousands of years in the mountains of the Canadian High Arctic and in turn revealing a treasure trove of ancient hunting tools.
Ice patches result from layers of annual snow that, until recently, remained frozen all year. As Earth's temperature has warmed in recent decades due to the accumulation of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, some of the ice patches have begun to melt away, sometimes revealing ancient artifacts to the surprise of archaeologists.
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Willy Ostreng, Professor and Chairman of the Research Institute Ocean Futures from Oslo, Norway, discusses the Arctic’s natural resources and heated issues in the region with RIA Novosti correspondent Ivan Sotnikov.
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When Russian President Dmitri Medvedev and Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg meet in Oslo on Monday, they will give their approval to the establishment of a borderzone between Norway and Russia.
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The image of polar bears apparently dancing as they wait for sea ice to form in the Arctic is one of 40 photographs identified as the most powerful nature pictures ever taken.
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Fifty-seven new species of fish have been added to a checklist of fish species living off the coast of Greenland, thanks to a new study conducted by Peter Rask Møller and colleagues from the Zoological Museum at the University of Copenhagen along with researchers from the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources and DTU Aqua in Denmark.
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Research for mineral resources in the Arctic may be hampered by a global trend towards colder weather rather than global warming, a Russian scientist said on Friday.
Prof. Oleg Pokrovsky of the Voeikov Main Geophysical Observatory (MGO) said the cold snap began in 1998 and the temperatures are predicted to return to the lows of the 1950s-1960s and reach their peak in 15 years.
Despite the predictions of global warming, which has been the greatest economic and political challenge, most parts of the world have recently seen widespread low temperatures and extremely heavy snowfalls.
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President Dmitri Medvedev is shaping Russian Arctic policy. BarentsObserver has compiled the comprehensive list of Russian future investment and activity plans in the Arctic.
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Two books offer different scenarios for the Arctic's new role in geopolitics.
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18 projects were selected in the last round to be funded by the Svalbard Environmental Fund. A record amount (4.7 mln NOK) was distributed. 25 projects have not received any funding.
Arctic Nature Guide studies and 3 other projects within travel industry were among funded applications. Several projects within protecting and preserving of the cultural heritage were also successful. There were 43 applications received and they represented a wide range of topics. The leadership of the fund priorities sound local projects with long-lasting benefits for the community in Svalbard.
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Even the Arctic has not emerged unscathed from the eruption of Eyjafjallajokull. A conference that was to be held in Moscow, Russia, called “The Arctic: Territory of Dialogue,” has been postponed until September due to the thousands of flight disruptions. The Russian Geographical Society will host the event, which is to supposed to mark the society’s revival.
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High spatial variability in snow accumulation pattern due to uneven surface topography and wind action and differential melting are characteristic features of Sørbreen, according to John Hulth report from field
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The research of the Arctic could help scientists to draw up measures in an effort to tackle climate change, a Russian lawmaker and polar explorer said on Wednesday.
The research "will help devise safe methods of calculation and forecast in the ocean and atmosphere and finding a system of measures to prevent negative changes in the environment," Artur Chilingarov said.
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The amount of organic materials dissolved in the Arctic Ocean has doubled over the last 12 years, which is possibly one more sign of global warming, Russian oceanographer Natalia Lapina said on Wednesday.
She explained that her research team had compared data on the amount of organic materials dissolved in the Arctic Ocean discovered in 1996 and in 2008. The investigation has revealed that during this period the amount of carbohydrates, lipids, proteins and chlorophyll in Arctic waters has increased 1.5-2 times.
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The Russian president’s representative for international cooperation in the Arctic and Antarctic, Arthur Chilingarov says that Russia is pushing ahead with its Arctic studies to determine the borders of the country’s continental shelf. In 2001, Moscow applied to the UN for a determination of its continental shelf in the Northern Arctic Ocean, the first time that a country in the Arctic region had done so.
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Officials in some of Nunavut's most northerly communities say they're getting mixed messages about Lancaster Sound, where the federal government has separate plans to create a conservation area and explore for oil and gas.
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March was the warmest March ever recorded worldwide, the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported Thursday. NCDC records go back to 1880.
Another source, the University of Alabama-Huntsville, also reported that March 2010 was the warmest March since their climate records began in 1979.
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Altered weather patterns may have made the disruption caused by volcanic ash from Iceland worse – and solar variability and climate change could be partly to blame.
Ash-laden Arctic air is blowing over Europe because the usual westerly winds are being "blocked" by a high-pressure weather system, and such blockages may become more common. "We predict that the frequency and length of blocking events will increase in a warmer climate," says Christophe Cassou of the European Centre for Research and Advanced Training in Scientific Computation in Toulouse, France.
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In 2007-08 tens marine complex expeditions in high latitudes of the Arctic and Antarktika were organized in the framework of IPY activities. New unique data were collected to estimate state of waters and ice in the polar Earth areas in new climatic conditions and obtain information about processes, which form these conditions.
Main goal of the Conference: to resume the preliminary results of research of the Arctic and South oceans during IPY 2007/08, estimate environment changes of the polar Earth areas and their possible effects.
Participating in the international science conference the scientists from different countries may exchange by new information and ideas concerning marine polar research.
Conference organization structure:
Plenary and sectional sessions will be organized according to main topical directions:
* polar oceanology;
* sea ice;
* ocean/atmosphere interaction;
* polar oceans and climate, impact of climatic changes on marine activities;
* marine ecosystems, marine environment contamination.
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The debate on establishing an EU Arctic Information Centre goes in favor of Rovaniemi and the centre could be a part of the Arctic Centre of the University of Lapland.
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If you think of Earth's poles as fraternal twins, the Arctic has been the wild one in recent years, while the Antarctic has been a steady plodder. Withered by summer heat, Arctic sea ice has shrunk to record low coverage several times since 2005, only to rebound to within 95 percent of its long-term average extent this winter. By comparison, Antarctica, with some 90 percent of the world's glacial reserves, has generally shed ice in more stately fashion.
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NASA's Aqua and Terra satellites fly around the world every day capturing images of weather, ice and land changes. Over the last three days these satellites have provided visible and infrared imagery of the ash plume from the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland.
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Russia may become a leader in the protection of the Arctic environment and northern indigenous peoples, the head of the International Indigenous Peoples Forum on Climate Change said in an interview with RIA Novosti.
Patricia Cochran, who heads the U.S.'s Alaska Native Science Commission, said rapid climate change is the main problem facing the Arctic, causing a number of concerns, such as "food safety and security, erosion and permafrost impacting community housing and infrastructure, safe traveling with loss of stable sea ice."
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Population in the Arctic regions in the world
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"IPY and beyond: From a snapshot to a movie?" is the title of Dr. Alexander Frolov's plenary lecture in the morning of the 12th. Dr. Frolov was appointed Head of the Russian Federal Service for Hydrometeorology & Environmental Monitoring (Roshydromet), in Moscow, Russia, a few weeks ago.
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New samples of L. Solidungula were collected in waters of Svalbard fiords during the frame of one of the Arctic Field Grant projects, Elen Belseth reports.
The fieldwork took place on board of R/V Jan Mayen during two weeks in August and September 2009.
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Current observational tools cannot account for roughly half of the heat that is believed to have built up on Earth in recent years, according to a "Perspectives" article in this week's issue of Science. Scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) warn in the new study that satellite sensors, ocean floats, and other instruments are inadequate to track this "missing" heat, which may be building up in the deep oceans or elsewhere in the climate system.
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Scientists at the University of Warwick and the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton have opened "the black box" of eukaryotic phytoplankton and discovered that they actually account for almost half the ocean's carbon fixation by phytoplankton.
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Melting Arctic ice affects the climate of the entire planet. Global warming has already driven polar bears to cannibalism and may threaten the lives of a quarter of the world’s population by 2100.
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Arctic peoples and their cultural inheritance are vulnerable to rising global temperatures, the Russian president's adviser on climate change said at the Fifth Arctic Leaders' Summit in Moscow on Wednesday.
"Climate change has a global character but the Arctic is one of the most vulnerable regions," said Alexander Bedritsky, who also chairs the World Meteorological Organization.
"The Arctic habitat, people and their cultural inheritance are vulnerable to the changing climate," he said, adding that around 40 groups of indigenous peoples live in the Arctic.
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Russian Arctic national park in the Novaya Zemlya archipelago, in the Arctic Ocean, is to be created in 2011, an expert said on Thursday.
Gennady Danilov, the director of the Franz Josef Land nature reserve, said the park's creation had been earlier scheduled for 2010, in line with the decree signed by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in June 2009.
However, the relevant bill has not yet been introduced, he said. "This was not done and we are drafting a letter to the government now," Danilov said.
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The volcanic ash cloud from Iceland is coming in over the Barents Region and the airspace over northern Norway and northern Sweden is Thursday closed for safety fears.
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Europe's first mission dedicated to studying variations in our planet's ice cover entered polar orbit just minutes after launch April 8, marking the start of three days intense activity. Mission controllers at ESOC, ESA's European Space Operations Centre, monitored CryoSat-2 around the clock to ensure the satellite's systems and payload were functioning normally.
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Close to 50 years of data show the Devon Island ice cap, one of the largest ice masses in the Canadian High Arctic, is thinning and shrinking.
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EPOCA international team plans a field experiment in Ny-Ålesund trying to determine how sensitive marine organisms are to increased acidity of the sea. 6 nations and 33 scientists and technicians will be working in Ny-Ålesund during the pelagic experiment this spring.
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Scientists have made new discoveries about the break-up of Gondwana, the supercontinent made up of present-day Antarctica, Australia and India which existed around 500 million years ago in the Southern Hemisphere. While in Antarctica, the team of scientists used three-dimensional imaging to find evidence of how the suprcontinent broke apart.
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The Finnish government has established an official group which is to support, follow up and coordinate Finnish activities in the Arctic.
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More than 10 million pieces of trash were plucked from the world's waterways in a single day last year. But for Philippe Cousteau, the beach sandals that washed up in the Norwegian arctic symbolized the global nature of the problem of marine debris.
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Though Canada often has the reputation of being the world's boy scout seeking the approval of others for its moral conduct, it also has a sense of healthy chauvinism when it comes to defending its sovereignty. However, Russia’s push to claim an enormous slice of the Arctic region over the past few years has put these two national personalities to the test.
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The radar instrument on Europe's Cryosat-2 spacecraft has been switched on and is reported to be working well.
The satellite, which was launched last Thursday from Kazakhstan, will use the equipment to map the thickness and shape of the Earth's polar ice cover.
Controllers must now check all of Cryosat's systems while a calibration team fine-tunes the radar.
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A French explorer's team says he has made the first Arctic crossing by balloon, landing in the tundra of eastern Siberia five days after taking off in Norway.
Jean-Louis Etienne traveled 3,130 kilometeres (1,945 miles) in his special balloon, sailing over the Arctic Circle.
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NASA has successfully completed the first science flight of the Global Hawk unpiloted aircraft system over the Pacific Ocean. The flight was the first of five scheduled for this month's Global Hawk Pacific, or GloPac, mission to study atmospheric science over the Pacific and Arctic oceans.
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A large number of Arctic seabirds have been meeting bizarre deaths, which could increase as climate change continues to warm the Arctic, according to Canadian scientists from the Arctic Institute of North America. As the Arctic warms with climate change, it could bring more storm events, including incidents of heavy fog, rain, freezing rain, wet snow and stronger winds, which could create more challenging living conditions for Arctic seabirds.
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The project GOOSEMAP has collected all known registrations of geese in Svalbard. This resulted in distribution maps of three goose species during different stages of their stay in Svalbard.
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Atmospheric water vapour (H2O) is the most important natural (as opposed to man-made) greenhouse gas, accounting for about two-thirds of the natural greenhouse effect. Despite this importance, its role in climate and its reaction to climate change are still difficult to assess.
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The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) with the Association of Polar Early Career Scientists (APECS), and the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC) have won funding from the International Council for Science (ICSU) for a project "Education and Outreach Lessons from IPY". This project will involve an assessment and compilation of recommendations that capture Education and Outreach lessons from the IPY.
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Canada's foreign minister blasted a Russian plan to drop paratroopers on the North Pole later this week, calling it a propaganda stunt.
"It's another stunt like the flag planting some years ago. It doesn't affect Canada's sovereignty," Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon said Tuesday, referring to the planting of a flag on the North Pole seabed by a Russian submarine in 2007.
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There are many skills that early career polar researchers require for the basis of a strong career. To help address this, the Association of Polar Early Career Scientists (APECS), together with the ArcticNet Student Association, and the Northern Research Forum held the IPY International Early Career Researcher Symposium, held in Victoria, B.C, Canada from December 4-8, which was sponsored mainly by the IPY Canadian Federal Programme and the Canadian Polar Research Commission. This career development workshop bought together 71 participants and 20 mentors from 14 different countries.
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Canada plans to ask Russia to collaborate on Arctic mapping projects in the hope it will defuse future tensions over ownership of lucrative undiscovered resources in the Far North.
Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon said Monday he will personally make the overture to his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, on a trip to Moscow in two weeks.
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The University in Arkhangelsk will have special focus on development of mineral resource, oil and gas.
The Russian Prime-Minister Vladimir Putin signed the decree on establishing the Northern Federal (Arctic) University in Arkhangelsk.
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Improvements in aerial survey methods have led to increased estimates of narwhal populations in the eastern Arctic, according to a paper published Arctic, the journal of the University of Calgary's Arctic Institute of North America.
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The Arctic Sea ice reached its maximum extent for this eyar on March 31st, 2010 - the latest date in the year for maximum Arctic sea ice extent since the start of satellite measurements of sea ice in 1979. After reaching an apparent maximum extent in early March, the sea ice began to decline before growing again to 15.25 million km². This late-season growth was triggered by cold weather and winds from the north over the Bering and Barents Seas.
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Nitrous oxide (N2O), which gets into the atmosphere from fertilizers used in agriculture or the use of fossil fuels, had been believed that while carbon dioxide and methane were released as permafrost melted, nitrous oxide remained in the permafrost. However according to a new study, the release of the powerful greenhouse gas nitrous oxide form thawing Arctic permafrost appears to have been overlooked.
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While the melting of the gigantic ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica as a consequence of global warming is well-established, researchers have sought to determine how fast sea level rise may occur. Current sea level rise is calculated at only about 2.5cm per decade; however this rate could increase over the next 50 years as warming continues.
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NASA, U.S. Navy and university researchers have successfully demonstrated the first robotic underwater vehicle to be powered entirely by natural, renewable, ocean thermal energy.
The Sounding Oceanographic Lagrangrian Observer Thermal RECharging (SOLO-TREC) autonomous underwater vehicle uses a novel thermal recharging engine powered by the natural temperature differences found at different ocean depths.
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93th anniversary of icebreaker KRASIN has been celebrated – 93 years ago the St. Andrew’s flag was raised. From this date she became a symbol of the Arctic Ocean development. All the world knows the icebreaker due to the rescue operations.
She is of the same age as revolution. She was built in 1917 in Newcastle on the stocks of English company “Armstrong” for the Russian fleet by improved project of Makarov’s “Ermak”. In 1927 she was named after soviet politician Leonid Krasin.
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The project “Panarctic ice drifting expedition” (PALEX) is aimed to collect hydrometeorological, hydrophysical, hydrochemical, hydrobiological and cryobiological data of water-ice system state in near Pole region of the Canadian sector of the Arctic Ocean. Arthur Chilingarov is the project leader, I.A.Melnikov is the research project leader. Drifting expeditions on the project PALEX were carried out on the base of Barneo station from 2007. In March 2010 the next stage of PALEX-2010 expedition started.
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In near future the Russia will apply to UN Committee to extend the borders of its shelf in the sea of Okhotsk, said on Wednesday Anatoliy Ledovskikh, the Head of Federal Agency on Subsoil use (Rosnedra). As a result our country may confirm its rights to the most part of the Arctic resources. However the resources will be developed with foreign partnership.
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UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon took a helicopter tour over the Aral Sea on Sunday, seeing first hand the environmental devastation the receding waters have left behind.
Ban, on a visit to Uzbekistan during a tour of Central Asia, circled over the sea and landed in the former coastal fishing town of Muynak, which is living evidence of the manmade tragedy.
The United Nations chief said the disappearance of the sea was one of the world's worst environmental disasters and called on Central Asian leaders to do more to address the problem.
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The Deadline for abstract submission for the Open SCAR Science Conference (3-6 August 2010, Buenos Aires) has been extended until the 15th April. The scientific program is already available under: http://www.dna.gov.ar/scar2010/sessions.htm
Below you can find the name of the APECS-conveners and their respective sessions at the OSC:
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The Russian Geographical Society (RGS) is to organize an Arctic expedition to investigate the effects of global warming on polar bears.
Scientists will also study polar bears' seasonal migration, the RGS said.
"One of the goals of the expedition is to study the rate of the decrease in polar bear populations," the RGS statement said.
Members of the month-long expedition "will focus on studying bears recently awakened after winter hibernation. Scientists will fix special satellite collars to monitor their movements and then analyze the data," the RGS statement said.
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In a bid to speed up the exploration of the shelf, Russian authorities are ready to let in foreign companies
Currently, only Russian state-controlled companies with experiences from shelf development are entitled to get offshore field licenses. That has given Gazprom and Rosneft a monopoly position on the country’s vast shelf.
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The rise in human emissions of carbon dioxide is driving fundamental and dangerous changes in the chemistry and ecosystems of the world's oceans, international marine scientists have warned.
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An international team of researchers is investigating ozone depletion in the polar stratosphere using data gathered during flights over the Arctic region at elevations of up to 20 kilometers.
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