December 23, 2008.
The Age of the Arctic. Policy conference, 19-20 January 2009
The opening of Arctic Frontiers conference will be held on Sunday 18 January at Polar Environmental Centre, while the conference itself will take place at the University of Tromsø.
Arctic marine ecosystems in an era
of rapid climate change & Arctic Ocean Governance.
Science conference, 21-23 January 2009
The scientific conference of Arctic Frontiers 2009 will focus primarily
on the structure and biogeochemical cycling of Arctic marine ecosystems
in a period of rapid climate changes.
Climate change will be the biggest challenge for the
Barents Region, the Norwegian Deputy Minister of Environment said when
meeting with a Russian counterpart this week. The two countries now establish
a joint working group on climate issues.
The meeting between Norway’s Heidi Sørensen and Russia’s
Sergey Donskoy was held as part of the Joint Norwegian Environmental Commission.
In the next few days, a convoy of bulldozers and trucks will set out from a remote airport in Siberia, heading for a frozen lake 62 miles north of the Arctic Circle, but the trip isn’t a holiday visit to the North Pole. Instead, the trucks will deliver core-drilling equipment for a study of sediment and meteorite-impact rocks that should provide the longest time-continuous climate record ever collected in the Arctic.
The federal government has decided not to list Ribbon seals under the Endangered Species Act. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says the ice-dependent animals don’t face extinction from climate change in the foreseeable future.
In order to strengthen its presence on the archipelago Svalbard, Russia
plans to open a scientific station in the old mining village of Pyramiden.
Vice speaker in the Russian State Duma and special representative to the
President on international cooperation in the Arctic and Antarctic, Artur
Chilingarov, told that Russia has to prove its entitlement to the Arctic
Shelf through presence in the area, news agency Strana reports.
Most atmospheric models predict that the rate of transport of air from the troposphere to the above lying stratosphere should be increasing due to climate change. Surprisingly, Dr. Andreas Engel together with an international group of researchers has now found that this does not seem to be happening. On the contrary, it seems that the air air masses are moving more slowly than predicted. This could also imply that recovery of the ozone layer may be somewhat slower than predicted by state-of-the-art atmospheric climate models.
The idea of a white Christmas may seem magical for many of us, but spare a thought for a team of scientists forgoing the festive season to take part in a novel campaign being carried out in one of the most inhospitable regions on Earth to support ESA's CryoSat mission...
Greenhouse gases play an important role in North American climate, but differences in regional ocean temperatures may hold a key to predicting future U.S. regional climate changes, according to a new NOAA-led scientific assessment. The assessment is one in a series of synthesis and assessment reports coordinated by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program.
A team led by International Arctic Research Center scientist Igor Semiletov has found data to suggest that the carbon pool beneath the Arctic Ocean is leaking.
