Fear are mounting for three people who were on a yacht missing in Antarctica.
Searchers have found the boat's only life raft damaged and covered in ice, but unoccupied.
The boat’s captain Jarle Andoy, who is known from TV both in Norway and Russia after a reality series called “Sea Spray/One year of adventures in Norway”, was on his way to the South Pole by skies when the yacht went missing.
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Scientists are unravelling the environmental changes that took place around the Arctic during an exceptional episode of ancient global warming. Newly published results from a high-resolution study of sediments collected on Spitsbergen represent a significant contribution to this endeavour.
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In a recent study published in Current Biology, a group of researchers studied collections of a filter-feeding marine invertebrate, Cellarinella nutti, which date back to 1901. The organisms are helping sequester more carbon from the atmosphere on the ocean seabed.
Numbers of the organism had been growing steadily until 1990, when scientists noticed its numbers double. According to David Barnes of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), “This is one of the few pieces of evidence that life in Antarctica has recently changed drastically” since the organisms are “taking more carbon dioxide out of circulation and locking it away on the seabed.”
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The Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV) celebrated its third anniversary February 24 with the arrival of seeds for rare lima beans, blight-resistant cantaloupe, and progenitors of antioxidant-rich red tomatoes from Peru and the Galapagos Islands. The arrival of these collections, including many drought- and flood-resistant varieties, comes at a time when natural and human-made risks to agriculture have reinforced the critical need to secure all the world's food crop varieties.
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The company Alltech intends to pick partners in its Pechora LNG project in the course of 2011.
Talking at an oil and gas conference last week, the general director of SN-Neftegaz, a subsidiary of Alltech, confirmed that project partners will be chosen in the course of the year. Vladimir Mikulik also reaffirmed his company’s intention to launch the four billion USD project by year 2015.
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They nicknamed it the "Little Balloon That Could." Launched in December of 2010 from McMurdo Station in Antarctica, the research balloon was a test run and it bobbed lower every day like it had some kind of leak. But every day for five days it rose back up in the sky to some 112,000 feet in the air.
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Even a regional nuclear war could spark "unprecedented" global cooling and reduce rainfall for years, according to U.S. government computer models.
Widespread famine and disease would likely follow, experts speculate.
During the Cold War a nuclear exchange between superpowers—such as the one feared for years between the United States and the former Soviet Union—was predicted to cause a "nuclear winter."
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Early this year, Lisa B. Helgason, University in Tromso and the Norwegian Polar Institute, showed in her Ph.d. thesis that arctic animals contain higher levels of halogenated organic contaminants in sensitive organs during periods of emaciation and that seasonal variations effect animals ability to break down those pollutants.
During her work, Lisa B. Helgason analysed trends of organochlorines and polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDE) in eggs of different sea birds, collected in the years 1983, 1993 and 2003 in Svalbard. Results show that levels of organochlorines decreased during this time period, whereas the concentration of PBDE in the sampled eggs increased.
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Oil caught in ice and booms full of lumps of ice hampers clean-up works after ship grounding in Southern Norway.
An Icelandic-owned 17,000-dwt cargo vessel ran aground and immediately started leaking oil Friday around the scenic islands of Hvaler on Norway’s southeast coast. It was unknown exactly how much oil was on board the ship, but estimates were as much as 800 tons.
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Statoil drills yet another dry well in western part of the Barents Sea.
Geologists, petroleum companies and politicians are highlighting that the Arctic is an area of high petroleum resource potential. US Geological Survey says nearly a quarter of the world’s undiscovered petroleum resources lie in the Arctic.
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A new paper by George Mason University researchers shows that 'Climategate' -- the unauthorized release in late 2009 of stolen e-mails between climate scientists in the U.S. and United Kingdom -- undermined belief in global warming and possibly also trust in climate scientists among TV meteorologists in the United States, at least temporarily.
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As part of a book about environmental conditions and impacts for Red List species in Norway, published by the Norwegian Biodiversity Information Centre (Artsdatabanken), the chapter about Svalbard has now been translated to English.
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A $28 million University of Colorado Boulder instrument developed to study changes in the sun's brightness and its impact on Earth's climate is one of two primary payloads on NASA's Glory mission set to launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on Feb. 23.
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University of Pittsburgh-led researchers extracted a 6,000-year climate record from a Washington lake that shows that the famously rain-soaked American Pacific Northwest could not only be in for longer dry seasons, but also is unlikely to see a period as wet as the 20th century any time soon.
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Black carbon (BC) and tropospheric ozone (O3) are harmful air pollutants that also contribute to climate change. The emission of both will continue to negatively impact both human health and climate.
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America is to cut off all funding to the United Nations climate science panel under sweeping Republican budget cuts that seek to gut spending on environmental protection.
The funding ban to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – stripping $2.3m (£1.31m) from an international organisation that relies heavily on volunteer scientists – was among some $61bn (£38bn) in cuts voted through the Republican-controlled House of Representatives on Saturday.
If enacted, the cuts package would reduce spending on environmental protection by nearly one-third, or about $3bn (£1.85bn), advancing a key objective of the conservative Tea Party of dismantling government regulation.
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Russia's Natural Resources Ministry wants to set an Arctic nature reserve's borders in a way that environmentalists say will subvert existing boundaries to accommodate the oil drilling plans of BP and Rosneft.
Last month BP -- seeking to recover from the impact of the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill -- and Russia's state-run major Rosneft said they would drill for oil in three huge offshore blocks in the Arctic Kara Sea.
Two of these blocks, according to a World Wildlife Fund (WWF) map, encroach on waters that are part of a protected national park and are home to polar bears and whales.
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A panel of scientists speaking Feb. 19 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) unveiled new research and models demonstrating how climate change could increase exposure and risk of human illness originating from ocean, coastal and Great Lakes ecosystems, with some studies projecting impacts to be felt within 30 years.
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Many species are projected to become vulnerable to twenty-first-century climate changes, with consequent effects on the tree of life. If losses were not randomly distributed across the tree of life, climate change could lead to a disproportionate loss of evolutionary history. Here we estimate the consequences of climate change on the phylogenetic diversities of plant, bird and mammal assemblages across Europe. Using a consensus across ensembles of forecasts for 2020, 2050 and 2080 and high-resolution phylogenetic trees, we show that species vulnerability to climate change clusters weakly across phylogenies. Such phylogenetic signal in species vulnerabilities does not lead to higher loss of evolutionary history than expected with a model of random extinctions.
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The Arctic Ocean is a forbidding place for oil drillers. But that is not stopping Russia from jumping in — or Western oil companies from eagerly following.
Russia, where onshore oil reserves are slowly dwindling, last month signed an Arctic exploration deal with the British petroleum giant BP, whose offshore drilling prospects in the United States were dimmed by the Gulf of Mexico disaster last year. Other Western oil companies, recognizing Moscow’s openness to new ocean drilling, are now having similar discussions with Russia.
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Foreign Minister Carl Bildt says it is crucial that the sensitive environment in the Arctic is protected.
With the move, Sweden follows Norway and Finland by initiating a national strategy for the Arctic region.
Carl Bildt surprised the Parliament in Stockholm on Wednesday when he announced that the Government will present a Swedish Arctic strategy in spring this year.
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Up to two-thirds of Earth's permafrost likely will disappear by 2200 as a result of warming temperatures, unleashing vast quantities of carbon into the atmosphere, says a new study by the University of Colorado Boulder's Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences.
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The Research Council of Norway is currently looking for three research advisers to work at the Svalbard Science Forum (SSF) in Longyearbyen.
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A study by scientists at the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science suggests a new way to estimate how much of the ocean's pollution is falling from the sky. The new findings can help improve scientific understanding of how toxic airborne chemicals, from the burning of fossil fuels and industrial power plants emissions, are impacting the oceans globally.
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The ozone layer -- the thin atmospheric band high-up in the stratosphere that protects living things on Earth from the sun's harmful ultraviolet rays, not to be confused with damaging ozone pollution close to the ground -- faces potential new challenges even as it continues its recovery from earlier damage, according to a recently released international science assessment. The report, prepared by the Scientific Assessment Panel of the U.N. Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, also presents stronger evidence that links changes in stratospheric ozone and Earth's climate.
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Naval power is characterized by fungibility and flexibility. Because of the relatively open nature of the seas, ships and fleets can be transferred between ports and crisis zones in order to conduct operations or exert influence. Indeed, one of the key appeals of naval power is the ability of warships to respond to crises in a variety of locations without requiring a longstanding political and infrastructural commitment.
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The health ministers from seven Arctic countries met in Nuuk, Greenland to discuss common health issues. Following extensive discussions, the meeting concluded with the signing of the "Arctic Health Declaration", an expressioin of the Arctic countries' intention to strengthen circumpolar cooperation on health issues.
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Belarus, with Russia’s assistance, will begin setting up its own polar station in Antarctica. The arrangement in principle about that was reached when Artur Chilingarov, the special envoy of the Russian president for international Arctic and Antarctica cooperation, and Vladimir Tsalko, the Belarusian minister of natural resources and environment, met on Monday.
“The interest lies in Belarus, with certain experience of work in polar zones, having a station of its own in Antarctica. We have actually agreed on that. Russia will assist Belarus in that in every way,” Chilingarov told reporters after the talks with the Belarusian minister.
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A new analysis of sulfur emissions appearing in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics shows that after declining for a decade, worldwide emissions rose again in 2000 due largely to international shipping and a growing Chinese economy. An accurate read on sulfur emissions will help researchers predict future changes in climate and determine present day effects on the atmosphere, health and the environment.
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Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Tuesday met with governor of Russia’s Far Eastern Chukotka autonomous area Roman Kopin to discuss the area’s economic development.
Preliminary estimates put the area’s 2010 GRP at about 39 billion roubles, or up by two billion roubles as compared with 2009, the Chukotka governor told the prime minister. However Kopin admitted the area’s authorities had hoped for a better figure.
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Recalculating the global use of phosphorous, a fertilizer linchpin of modern agriculture, a team of researchers warns that the world's stocks may soon be in short supply and that overuse in the industrialized world has become a leading cause of the pollution of lakes, rivers and streams.
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Go back a thousand years, and you would find the sea surface temperature of the Baltic Sea slightly warmer and the oxygen depletion much wider spread than it is today.
These are some of the preliminary findings of the international INFLOW research project within BONUS, the joint Baltic Sea Research and Development Programme. The Academy of Finland is the Finnish funding agency participating in BONUS.
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A set of maps have illustrated, for the first time, how the last British ice sheet shrunk during the Ice Age. Experts developed the maps to understand what effect the current shrinking of ice sheets in parts of the Antarctic and Greenland will have on the speed of sea level rise.
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“Murmansk – the strategic capital of the Arctic” is the headline this autumn.
The dates are set for the third international economical forum, September 30 to October 2.
The conference focuses on the economical development in Arctic Russia. Especially exploration of offshore petroleum resources.
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At least 150,000 tons of oil, 400,000 tons of gas condensate and 600,000 tons of iron ore are planned shipped along the Northern Sea Route in 2011.
The several successful shipping operations in 2010 are now making shipping companies look at the Northern Sea Route with increasing interest. According to Nord News, at least 150,000 tons of oil are planned shipped from Murmansk to China. In addition, there are plans for about 400,000 tons of gas condensate and 600,000 tons of iron ore to be sent along the same route.
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Tiny organisms preserved in marine sediments hold clues about Arctic climate variation during an ancient episode of greenhouse warming.
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Measuring the results of scientific research has seen little federal focus in the U.S. until now.
A 2010 administrative memorandum calls on U.S. federal agencies and executive departments to develop tools to "better assess the impact of [...] science and technology investments."
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Finland intends to expand cooperation with Russia in the extreme north, specifically, in the use of the Arctic Route, as the importance of Arctic territories increases, Finnish Foreign Minister Alexander Stubb told the “Finnish-Russian Arctic Partnership” seminar at the Russian Geographic Society in St Petersburg on Wednesday.
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During the first week of January 2011, the University of Rome La Sapienza and the ISTAR Group launched two small stratospheric balloons from Ny-Ålesund, in order to observe the polar winter night sky stratospheric wind trajectories. Here, the scientists report about their work.
The purpose of the campaign was to observe, in real time, the polar winter night sky stratospheric wind trajectories for planning future campaigns with heavy lift Long Duration Balloons (LDB) during the polar night. The advantage of a winter flight offers observations without the solar radiation experienced during the summer months.
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Analysis of a comprehensive database has revealed strong links between biological productivity in the surface oceans and patterns of biomass and abundance at the seafloor, helping to explain large regional differences. The research was conducted by an international, multi-institutional research team including scientists from the National Oceanography Centre (NOC), and incorporated data from the Census of Marine Life (CoML).
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Under our feet and ubiquitous, lowly soil can be easily overlooked when it comes to addressing climate change and population growth. But in the January-February issue of the Soil Science Society of America Journal, a team of scientists say soil is an essential piece of the biosphere and more attention should be paid to protecting it. Strategies for doing so include refocusing and boosting research, and communicating its importance to the public.
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Russia plans to build a research center for monitoring of the environment in the Arctic on the archipelago of Svalbard.
The plan is to modernize already existing buildings and have the new research center up and running by 2013.
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You can take part in the first ever North Pole above and below expedition, if you are willing to pay €53,000.
According to the organizer, Nigel Gifford, the tour will be the first time ever offering both a tandem skydive and scuba dive at the North Pole.
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Gas from the Yamal Peninsula will cover the current deficit in Northwest Russia, a leading representative of Gazprom says.
Speaking at a company meeting on Wednesday, Deputy Chairman of Gazprom’s Management Committee Valeri Golubyov said that gas from the Bovanenkovo field in Yamal by year 2013 will cover the current deficit in Northern and Northwestern Russia.
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In its report, NorACIA gathers available knowledge about climate change in northern Norway, Svalbard and the surrounding oceans, in order to form a basis for further studies to improve current understanding of the interconnections and effects within the Arctic Climate System.
NorACIA (Norwegian Arctic Climate Impact Assessment) is an initiative taken by the Norwegian government as a follow-up to the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA). The initiative has previously issued five sub-reports dealing with climate development in northern Norway and Svalbard during 1900-2100, physical and biogeochemical processes, effects on ecosystems and biodiversity, effects on people and society and adaptation and mitigation.
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Under the umbrella of the Arctic Council Working Group on Conservation of Arctic Flora and Fauna (CAFF), a project was launched to initiate the development of a pan-arctic monitoring plan for polar bears.
The project is funded by the US Marine Mammal Commission, and its prime investigator is senior adviser Dag Vongraven at the Norwegian Polar Institute.
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Russia and Finland will discuss Arctic cooperation at a seminar in St. Petersburg on Wednesday.
"The Arctic has been attracting more attention from the international community in recent years," the Russian Geographical Society said in a statement.
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Two amphibious all-terrain vehicles will set on an expedition around the world on February 17 via remote Arctic regions in Europe, Asia and North America. It is hoped that the Russian expedition, Polar Ring, will solve the mystery of Sigizmund Levanevsky’s ill-fated Arctic flight.
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Polar bear mothers will have a harder time carrying cubs to term as Arctic sea ice dwindles, a new study said, and the U.S. government recognized that Pacific walruses need protection in their melting icy habitat.
Arctic ice reached the third-lowest level ever recorded in 2010, and was at record low levels in January. Because the Arctic is a major weather-maker for much of the Northern Hemisphere, these changes are being blamed for severe storms in some of the world's most densely populated areas.
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Stortinget, the Norwegian Parliament, will ratify the agreement with Russian on delimitation of the Barents Sea and Arctic Oceans.
The border deal with Norway is still not scheduled for ratification in the Russian State Duma.
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Did climate change shape human evolution? This question has old, deep roots (1, 2), but in recent decades, the fossil record of hominin evolution and behavior has improved, although it remains incomplete, and great progress has been made in the quality and number of African paleoclimate records from land and ocean sediments (3). A recent National Research Council (NRC) report (4) examines emerging faunal and paleoclimate evidence underlying the hypothesis that past climate changes may have influenced our evolution.
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For 15 million years, an icebound lake has remained sealed deep beneath Antarctica's frozen crust, possibly hiding prehistoric or unknown life. Now Russian scientists are on the brink of piercing through to its secrets.
"There's only a bit left to go," Alexei Turkeyev, chief of the Russian polar Vostok Station, told Reuters by satellite phone. His team has drilled for weeks in a race to reach the lake, 3,750 meters (12,000 ft) beneath the polar ice cap, before the end of the brief Antarctic summer.
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The substantial decline of Arctic sea ice in recent years has triggered some fears that the ice cover might be approaching a "tipping point" beyond which the loss of the remaining sea ice would become unstoppable. However, new research carried out at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg/Germany now indicates that such tipping point is unlikely to exist for the loss of Arctic summer sea ice. The sea-ice cover reacts instead relatively directly to the climatic conditions at any given time. Hence, the ongoing loss of Arctic sea ice could be slowed down and eventually stopped if global warming were to be slowed down and eventually stopped.
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The amount of fish caught in the Arctic has been dramatically under-reported for decades, making the northern ocean environment appear far more pristine than it really is, according to a new study.
An estimated 950,000 tonnes of fish were caught in Russian, Canadian and U.S. Arctic waters between 1950 and 2006, which is 75 times higher than reported by the United Nation's agency that records catch levels, according to Canadian researchers.
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Until recently, Arctic air was just flowing south, and warm air was headed north.
Dense cold air usually causes a circular wind pattern called a polar vortex that helps keep cold air trapped near the Arctic, the NSIDC says.
But this pattern didn’t develop this year because the Arctic Ocean was sending warmth into the atmosphere.
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Earth's global temperature has been rising gradually over the last decades, but the warming has not been the same everywhere. Scientists are therefore trying to pin down how the warming has affected regional climates because that is what really matters to people, and to adaptation and mitigation strategies. Their efforts, however, had hit a roadblock because the necessary observations of the winds over the oceans were biased.
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A growing global population has lead to increasing demands for food. Farmers around the world rely, at least in part on phosphorus-based fertilizers in order to sustain and improve crop yields. But the overuse of phosphorus can lead to freshwater pollution and the development of a host of problems, such as the spread of blue-green algae in lakes and the growth of coastal 'dead zones'.
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On Friday, Jan. 28 in Antarctica, a research team investigating the last 100,000 years of Earth's climate history reached an important milestone completing the main ice core to a depth of 3,331 meters (10,928 feet) at West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide (WAIS). The project will be completed over the next two years with some additional coring and borehole logging to obtain additional information and samples of the ice for the study of the climate record contained in the core.
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Russia’s second biggest gas producer Novatek has signed a cooperation agreement with icebreaker operator Atomflot on shipping along the Northern Sea Route.
The agreement lays down both companies’ intent to engage in strategic cooperation in the field of safe shipping, a press release from Novatek reads. It includes both shipping of equipment for the development of the South Tambey field in the Yamal Peninsula and of LNG from the same field.
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But Russia and Denmark might not agree about the belonging of the North Pole point, a leading Russian researcher says.
The five countries bordering the Arctic Ocean do not have conflicting positions about the continental nature of the Lomonosov Ridge, leader of the Arctic expeditions of the VNIIOkeangeologia institute Viktor Paselov told Rossiiskaya Gazeta.
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Arctic sea ice extent for January 2011 was the lowest in the satellite record for that month. The Arctic oscillation persisted in its strong negative phase for most of the month, keeping ice extent low
Air temperatures over much of the Arctic were 2 to 6 degrees Celsius (4 to 11 degrees Fahrenheit) above normal in January. Over the eastern Canadian Arctic Archipelago, Baffin Bay/Davis Strait and Labrador Sea, temperatures were at least 6 degrees Celsius (11 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than average.
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The atlas presents the distribution of 48 chemical elements on Spitsbergen and puts their natural content in contrast to local anthropogenic influences.
The atlas, published in December 2010, has been produced in cooperation between the Geological Survey of Norway (NGU), the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Administration (NVE), the Climate and Pollution Agency (Klif), the Governor of Svalbard (SMS) and the Norwegian Polar Institute (NPI).
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Scientists can now tap into a flow of new data that will help to determine exactly how Earth's ice is changing. This information from ESA's CryoSat mission is set to make a step change in our understanding of the complex relationship between ice and climate.
Considering the loss of the original CryoSat satellite during launch in 2005, scientists around the world have had a long wait for information on ice thickness – making the release even more of a milestone for the mission.
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The scientist shuffles across the frozen lake, scuffing aside ankle-deep snow until he finds a cluster of bubbles trapped under the ice. With a cigarette lighter in one hand and a knife in the other, he lances the ice like a blister. Methane whooshes out and bursts into a thin blue flame.
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New discoveries on how underwater ridges impact the ocean's circulation system will help improve climate projections.
An underwater ridge can trap the flow of cold, dense water at the bottom of the ocean. Without the ridge, deepwater can flow freely and speed up the ocean circulation pattern, which generally increases the flow of warm surface water.
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In one of the most dramatic signs documented of how shrinking Arctic sea ice affects polar bears, researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey in Alaska have tracked a female bear that swam nine days across the deep, frigid Beaufort Sea before reaching an ice floe 426 miles offshore.
The marathon swim came at a cost: With little food probably available once she arrived, the bear lost 22 percent of her body weight and her year-old female cub, which set off on the journey but did not survive, the researchers said.
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Indigenous Sami peoples in the Arctic may have found a way to help their reindeer herds cope with climate change: more castration.
Research by Sami experts shows that sterilized males can grow larger and so are better at digging for food -- as Arctic temperatures vary more, thawing snow often refreezes to form thick ice over lichen pastures.
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More mercury is deposited in the Arctic than anywhere else on the planet. Researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) think that one explanation for this may lie in the meteorological conditions in the Arctic spring and summer.
The concentration of mercury in humans and animals that live in polar regions is on the increase. Polar bears and humans that eat marine mammals are the most affected.
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The European Space Agency's Cluster satellites have flown through a natural particle accelerator just above Earth's atmosphere. The data they collected are unlocking how most of the dramatic displays of the northern and southern lights are generated.
Two of Cluster's four satellites found themselves in a natural particle accelerator above the northern hemisphere on 5 June 2009. The first to cross was satellite C3 at an altitude of 6400 km, followed five minutes later by C1 at 9000 km.
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The Russian Ministry of Natural Resources intends to step up the level of control in offshore oil and gas projects.
-We will heighten the level of control, including in Arctic projects, [and] the instructions have already been given to the Nature Control Agency, leader of the Ministry’s Department of State Policy in the field of Geology and Mineral Extration Denis Khramov.
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The 15th working meeting of the Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG) from the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) was convened in Copenhagen in 2009. The proceedings contain an overview of ongoing research and management activities on polar bears in the Arctic since 2005.
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Engineers have created a new type of "stereo vision" to use in studying ocean waves as they pound against the shore, providing a better way to understand and monitor this violent, ever-changing environment.
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