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Change in IPO
Report no. 36, April 2010
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In 2009, Russia completed the geological mapping of the shelf of the Caspian and Okhotsk Seas and will in 2010 focus on Arctic waters, Deputy Premier Sergey Ivanov said today.
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New NASA measurements show that the Gulf Stream has not slowed down over the past 15 years. In fact, it may even have sped up slightly.
The Atlantic overturning circulation is a system of currents, including the Gulf Stream, that bring warm surface waters from the tropics northward into the North Atlantic. There, the water cools, sinks to great depths and changes direction.
Without the heat carried by this circulation system, the climate around the North Atlantic - in Europe, North America and North Africa - would probably be a great deal colder.
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Although Arctic issues and those of the Arctic Ocean have only been discussed by the few littoral nations until now, it appears that the region will soon be reorganized on a grand scale.
On March 29, Chelsea, Canada hosted a meeting of Arctic Ocean Foreign Ministers from Canada, the United States, Russia, Denmark and Norway that share the shores of the Arctic Ocean.
One thing is clear from the meeting: many other countries want access to the region. Nobody would dare tell China, who is openly eyeing the resource-rich Arctic, to keep out. The eventual re-division of the area's mineral resources seems inevitable.
It is high time everybody stopped wondering how many non-Arctic nations want access to the region, including its oil and gas deposits. I addition, the Arctic has a unique natural feature giving it natural-monopolist status. Due to global warming, Arctic sea passages in northern Russia and Canada remain ice-free for increasingly longer periods.
Year-round navigation would shorten merchant-marine traffic routes from China to Germany or the U.S. East Coast by 6,000-7,000 km in one direction.
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Canada and Denmark have begun discussions aimed at resolving a decades-old boundary dispute in the Arctic Ocean, Canwest News Service has learned.
The disagreement over a 200-square-kilometre section of the Lincoln Sea emerged in the early 1970s when the countries were first delineating the offshore boundary north of Canada's Ellesmere Island and Danish-controlled Greenland.
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It was supposed to be a meeting of polar pals. But a high-level session on the dramatic changes in the Arctic turned chilly Monday, as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton rapped Canada for leaving out several players.
The Canadian government invited the other four countries with Arctic coastlines -- Russia, Norway, Denmark and the United States -- to hold talks on developing the region, which is being transformed by climate change.
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The Arctic Five foreign ministers are due to meet in Canada soon to discuss the future of the Arctic. The countries have been locked in a tight race to lay claim to the riches believed to lie beneath the Arctic ice.
The five nations bordering the Arctic – Russia, Norway, Denmark, Canada and the US – have their hands outstretched for a piece of this pie.
It looks even more attractive, as experts claim the Arctic seabed contains around one-quarter of the world's oil and gas reserves. The scientists are central to deciding whose treasure house it is. Russia now claims the Arctic's two main shelves.
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The continuation of melting sea ice and expansion of water in the Arctic Ocean is beginning to impact the degree to which the Arctic states - Canada, Denmark via Greenland, Iceland, Norway, the US and Russia - engage the region in what may soon become an Arctic race for natural resources and territory.
While each country has been mandated by the UN to register their claims in the Arctic region before various deadlines - Russia’s claim is due this year and Canada’s in 2013 - the Arctic states have already begun to deploy state forces and research teams to uncharted arctic territory.
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A new processing algorithm developed thanks to images from the Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) on ESA’s Envisat satellite will allow for the retrieval of boreal forest biomass well beyond levels previously reported.
Forests are a crucial link in the Earth’s carbon cycle and absorb carbon from the atmosphere before storing it in the biomass. Boreal forests, which cover some 16 million km² of the Earth’s surface, store a third more carbon per hectare than tropical forests. However, the regions are generally considered areas of increased warming and thus represent possible important tipping points for abrupt climate change
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Eleven questions that should shape the next decade of geographical sciences research were identified in a new report by the National Research Council. Reflecting a time when populations are moving and natural resources are being depleted, the questions aim to provide a more complete understanding of where and how landscapes are changing to help society manage and adapt to the transformation of Earth's surface.
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Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has gone to Canada to attend a G-8 ministerial session and the second meeting of the Arctic Five on March 29-30.
The Arctic Five (Russia, the United States, Canada, Denmark and Norway) will meet in Chelsea, north of Ottawa, on March 29 to discuss continental shelf problems, climate change, preservation of fragile Arctic eco-systems, development of Arctic resources and scientific cooperation, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Andrei Nesterenko said.
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Long-term climate fluctuations were probably the main reason for the extinction of the dinosaurs and other creatures 65 million years ago. This conclusion was reached by PD Dr. Michael Prauss, paleontologist at Freie Universitaet Berlin, based on his latest research results.
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Half of Canadians believe Canada should exercise military might to assert sovereignty in the resource-rich Arctic, a new poll shows.
Another 10 percent of Canadians believe the country should flex military muscle — but only as a purely symbolic gesture — while 22 percent believe any disputes over the region’s resources and transportation routes can be resolved through legal and diplomatic means.
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The underwater life during polar night puzzles and delivers cues to understand the interactions between ocean and atmosphere in the winter. The ocean is not asleep at all in the darkness: the microorganisms migrate up and down regardless if the light is delivered or not. Several research groups from Norway and USA joined in an educational project (NORUS) combining science with newest underwater technology to find out what is really driving them and how it works.
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Federal authorities will invest 1.2 billion RUB in equipment for the new Arctic University in Arkhangelsk, the regional administration says.
The authorities in Arkhangelsk Oblast expects that the federal government will invest 1.2 billion RUB in equipment for the new university, Yelena Sbrodova, member of the regional parliament.
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An evidence for cool Arctic marine temperatures during the Cretaceous greenhouse has been found in the rocks of Svalbard.New stable isotope data from derived from the Cretaceous (Valanginian) of the Festningen Section and Janusfjellet reveals transient glacial marine temperatures during the Cretaceous greenhouse.
The analysis of co-existing belemnite fossils and glendonites (calcite pseudomorphs after the metastable mineral ikaite) enabled a constrain upon the isotopic composition of seawater providing conference in the temperature interpretations. Using this methodology the analyses yielded cool temperatures consistent with transient glacial polar conditions during the Cretaceous greenhouse.
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The Arctic is probably the last frontier for the final human expansion. Arctic melting has led to a rush for the vast natural resources as bordering countries try to assert their rights to a potential bonanza of Arctic mining for precious mineral resources, including crude oil, natural gas and gold. Other economic benefits include new shipping lines opening up as the ice melts, which in turn also provides access to new fishing areas. The hydrocarbon deposits in a deep-water area of the Arctic Ocean are estimated at 15-20 billion tons. The Arctic also has deposits of nickel, copper, tungsten, gold, silver, manganese, chromium and titanium. For instance, 11% of Russia’s GDP and 22% of Russia’s exports are produced in the Arctic. The Northern Sea Route, a major national transportation route, links the Russian Far East to western areas of the Russian Federation. It is thus quite natural that the Arctic nations started to compete for those resources. The Arctic Big Five (The United States (Alaska), Canada, Denmark (Greenland), Norway and Russia) have all joined the race to claim vast untapped riches hidden beneath the ice...
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NASA's Operation IceBridge mission, the largest airborne survey ever flown of Earth's polar ice, kicked off its second year of study when NASA aircraft arrived in Greenland March 22.
The IceBridge mission allows scientists to track changes in the extent and thickness of polar ice, which is important for understanding ice dynamics. IceBridge began in March 2009 as a means to fill the gap in polar observations between the loss of NASA's Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite, or ICESat, and the launch of ICESat-2, planned for 2015.
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The city of Arkhangelsk is likely to become the base for training of specialists for the Shtokman project, representatives of the regional administration said after a meeting with the Shtokman Development AG this week.
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Warmer, wetter weather in the Canadian Arctic could create problems for nesting seabirds, say a team of Canadian scientists who, between them, have spent over 7,000 days observing birds in the North.
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In a new blow to the climate change lobby, Russia's top weatherman today announced that the winter now drawing to a close in Siberia may turn out to be the coldest on record.
'The winter of 2009-10 was one of the most severe in European part of Russia for more than 30 years, and in Siberia it was perhaps the record breaking coldest ever,' said Dr Alexander Frolov, head of state meteorological service Rosgidromet.
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With climate change transforming the Arctic, biologists are scrambling to understand the impact on gray whales and other creatures living in the region
The season of migration has come again to the warm blue waters off the coast of Mexico. Mother gray whales are nursing their newborn calves, plumping them up for the 6,000-mile trip next month to summer feeding grounds in the Arctic.
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Vnukovo airport outside Moscow should become the main logistics base in Russia’s increased focus on the High North, says Presidential Aide on Arctic and Antarctic Affairs Artur Chilingarov.
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The Russian state is preparing for the sale of the Trebs and Titov oil fields in the Nenets Autonomous Okrug. Oil companies have long awaited a decision on the fields, which have a total of more than 200 million tons of reserves.
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It is a biological mystery; the Black-legged Kittiwakes have already arrived in the coastal border areas between Norway and Russia in the north. The birds are nesting between ice and snow.
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In yesterday's post, we focused on phytoplankton growth in the Southern Ocean, the role of iron in limiting or favoring that growth and the importance of those Southern Ocean biological processes in the global carbon cycle. Today we explore the role of winds in the same region - the Southern Ocean - and again the importance of processes in that region for the global carbon cycle.
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Arctic Species Trend Index (ASTI) is a biodiversity project commissioned and coordinated by the Arctic Council's CAFF working group's Circumpolar Biodiversity Monitoring Program. The ASTI keeps track how the Arctic's ecosystems and the living resources dependent upon the ecosystems are responding to the environmental change taking place in the Arctic today. The Index, which was developed as a collaboration between the CBMP, the Zoological Society of London, UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre and the Worldwide Fund for Nature, uses population monitoring data to track trends in marine, terrestrial and freshwater Arctic vertebrate species. The index allows for a composite measure of the overall population trends of Arctic vertebrate populations. It can also be organized to display trends based on taxonomy, biome or region. Currently, the Index tracks almost 1000 Arctic vertebrate population data-sets by biome, taxa, migratory status etc. making it very important information source on Arctic biodiversity trends.
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Russia will not concede its right to develop mineral deposits in the Arctic to any other country, President Dmitry Medvedev said at Wednesday's meeting of the Security Council, which discussed measures to ward off threats to national security stemming from global climate change.
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Another Canada-Russia showdown over untapped Arctic resources is looming later this month at a sleepy retreat near Ottawa.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said Wednesday his country will aggressively pursue its interests in the Arctic.
In a direct response, Canada said it would reassert its sovereignty over the Far North at what is shaping up to be a controversial five-country Arctic summit it is hosting in two weeks in Chelsea, Que., outside Ottawa.
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A new assessment of the Arctic's biodiversity reports a 26 per cent decline in species populations in the high Arctic.
Populations of lemmings, caribou and red knot are some of the species that have experienced declines over the past 34 years, according to the first report from The Arctic Species Trend Index (ASTI), which provides crucial information on how the Arctic's ecosystems and wildlife are responding to environmental change.
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NASA scientists analyzing 30 years of satellite data have found that the amount of ultraviolet (UV) radiation reaching Earth's surface has increased markedly over the last three decades. Most of the increase has occurred in the mid-and-high latitudes, and there's been little or no increase in tropical regions.
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Restrictions on Russia's access to the development of hydrocarbon fields in the Arctic, which accounts for over 25% of global oil and gas reserves, is unacceptable, President Dmitry Medvedev said on Wednesday.
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Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said on Wednesday some countries’ attempts to restrict Russia’s access to Arctic fields are inadmissible.
At the meeting of the Security Council the head of state warned that “the climate change can give rise not only to physical modifications in the natural environment, but also interstate contradictions related to the geological survey and exploration of energy resources, the use of sea transport routes and bioresources and water and food shortage.”
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A US proposal to outlaw international trade in polar bear parts including paws, fur and teeth was voted down today in Doha, Qatar, at a triennial international summit on trade in wildlife products.
Opposition was mainly from Canada, Norway and Greenland, whose aboriginal communities hunt the bears as a resource for food, clothing and shelter. By-products from the hunts are sold internationally, especially from Canada.
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The Russian Ministry of Transport has prepared a bill, which is to regulate commercial shipping along the Northern Sea Route.
The bill describes the waters of the Northern Sea Route and lays down principles for operations along the route, a ministry spokesman told Regnum.
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The next few years will provide new possibilities in the High North believes newly elected President of the Norwegian Shipowners' Association Thor Jørgen Guttormsen.
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Australian and US scientists have discovered how changes in winds blowing on the Southern Ocean drive variations in the depth of the surface layer of sea water responsible for regulating exchanges of heat and carbon dioxide between the ocean and the atmosphere.
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In a paper in the journal Science, published on 5 March, researchers from Russia, Sweden and the USA reported their results from 5000 at-sea measurements of dissolved methane in the coastal waters off of Eastern Siberia. They showed that most of the bottom waters and more than half of the surface waters of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf contained supersaturations of methane - a supersaturation represents more methane than expected and indicates a source other than the atmosphere. They determined that the methane entered the ocean waters from below, from the large reserviors of methane and other carbon in the sub-sea permafrost.
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In the far northern reaches of the Arctic, day versus night often doesn't mean a whole lot. During parts of the year, the sun does not set; at other times, it's just the opposite. A new study reported online on March 11th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, shows that Arctic reindeer have come up with a solution to living under those extreme conditions: They've abandoned use of the internal clock that drives the daily biological rhythms in other organisms.
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-We are working within the frames of the rules formulated by the United Nations, on the basis of international law, Putin said yesterday about his country’s policies towards the Arctic. He maintained that there lately has been too much noise around studies of the Arctic.
Talking to the board of the Russian Geographical Society yesterday, Putin said that the Russian flag planting on the North Pole sea bed had arisen “much noise” among the country’s neighbors. He maintained that the reactions on the flag planting had been “absolutely unfounded”.
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Levels of the main greenhouse gas in the atmosphere have risen to new highs in 2010 despite an economic slowdown in many nations that braked industrial output, data showed on Monday.
Carbon dioxide, measured at Norway's Zeppelin station on the Arctic Svalbard archipelago, rose to a median 393.71 parts per million of the atmosphere in the first two weeks of March from 393.17 in the same period of 2009, extending years of gains.
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Within the European research project RECONCILE the Russian high-flying research aircraft M55 Geophysica landed in Longyearbyen, Svalbard. It was the first time that this special aircraft went this far north. This mission was part of a 6-week measurement campaign based in Kiruna, Sweden.
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The Svalbard “Doomsday” Global Seed Vault is surpassing 500,000 samples to become the most diverse collection of food seeds in history.
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A dimming of the sun to match conditions in the "Little Ice Age" of the 17th century would only slightly slow global warming, a study indicated on Wednesday.
A weakening of solar activity in recent years, linked to fewer sunspots, would cut at most 0.3 degree Celsius (0.5 F) from a projected rise in temperatures by 2100 if it becomes a long-lasting "Grand Minimum" of brightness, they said.
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Climate change is here and scientists need to do a better job of explaining it to the public, the director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Friday. We are no longer constrained by talking about some possible future. Climate change is happening now and it's happening in people's back yards," Jane Lubchenco told reporters at a briefing. "Scientists have seriously underestimated the importance of explaining what we know about climate in a way people can understand," she said.
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Russia’s First Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov is appointed new Head of the Governmental Commission for Russian presence on Svalbard.
Zubkov takes over the post after another First Deputy Prime Minister, Igor Shuvalov.
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China formally signed up on Tuesday for the climate accord struck at the Copenhagen summit, the last major emerging economy to endorse a plan strongly favoured by the United States.
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A three-year field program now underway is measuring carbon distributions and primary productivity in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean to help scientists worldwide determine the impacts of a changing climate on ocean biology and biogeochemistry. The study, Climate Variability on the East Coast (CliVEC), will also help validate ocean color satellite measurements and refine biogeochemistry models of ocean processes.
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Each year Svalbard Science Forum and the Norwegian Polar Institute designate funds to selected Master students, PhD students and researchers associated with Norwegian institutions for fieldwork in Svalbard. The intention of the fund is to support researchers and students carrying out fieldwork in Svalbard with an emphasis on those that are new to Svalbard. The scholarship is allocated yearly and the next application deadline will be announced in late summer/early autumn 2010.
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Since 2004, University at Buffalo anthropologist Ezra Zubrow has worked intensively with teams of scientists in the Arctic regions of St. James Bay, Quebec, northern Finland and Kamchatka to understand how humans living 4,000 to 6,000 years ago reacted to climate changes.
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The recently observed reduction in air pollution implies that more solar radiation reaches the Earth's surface. This could lead to a far more rapid increase in the Earth's temperature in the coming decades than has previously been expected based on calculations of CO2 emissions alone.
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The general aim of the ColdWear project at SINTEF is to gather physiological data on how we react to cold. These data will give scientists the expertise they need to develop what they call "advanced protection" for persons who operate in our most severe climate zones, such as Siberia and the Arctic.
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SSF and SMS have jointly organized a workshop that aimed at exchange of information and finding solutions for accessing and carrying out future research in the least accessible, and the most logistically demanding places in Svalbard - the East.
East Svalbard is indispensable as reference area. Its importance for monitoring climate change in the Arctic through reference-based research cannot be underestimated e.g. the changes in weather patterns are first visible in the east and should be captured already there.
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A section of the Arctic Ocean seafloor that holds vast stores of frozen methane is showing signs of instability and widespread venting of the powerful greenhouse gas, according to the findings of an international research team led by University of Alaska Fairbanks scientists Natalia Shakhova and Igor Semiletov.
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The ongoing El Niño of 2010 is affecting north Pacific Ocean ecosystems in ways that could affect the West Coast fishing industry, according to scientists at NOAA and Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego.
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Content:
1) Oslo Science Conference
2) Polar Week - 15 to 19 March 2010
3) IPY Publications Database
4) IPY International Field School in Svalbard, 21 June to 9 July 2010
5) Call for proposals for International Teams in Space Science
6) APECS Update
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The beasts had long lain extinct and forgotten, embedded deep in the frozen turf, bodies swaddled in Earth's layers for thousands of years before Christ.
Now, the Russian permafrost is offering up the bones and tusks of the woolly mammoths that once lumbered over the tundra. They are shaped into picture frames, chess sets, pendants. They are gathered and piled, carved and whittled, bought and sold on the Internet.
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Scientists at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory have found evidence of hydrothermal vents on the seafloor near Antarctica, formerly a blank spot on the map for researchers wanting to learn more about seafloor formation and the bizarre life forms drawn to these extreme environments.
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Skepticism about climate change is going mainstream, and that is worrying. One-third of Americans now say global warming doesn’t exist – triple the percentage of three years ago.
This defiance of science isn’t just harmful for the environment. It’s also distracting us from growing threats to US national security. Actual – not theoretical – effects of climate change are turning the Arctic into a potential military flash point.
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Margit Dyrland has worked on observations of temperature and airglow changes in upper atmosphere/mesosphere trying to find a key to weather and climate variability. Combination of several methods was used and she has found relationships between various climate elements, fully described in her PhD thesis.
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A large space rock may have exploded over Antarctica thousands of years ago, showering a large area with debris, according to new research.
The evidence comes from accumulations of tiny meteoritic particles and a layer of extraterrestrial dust found in Antarctic ice cores.
Details of the work were presented at a major science conference in Texas.
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China is starting to prepare for the commercial and strategic opportunities arising as global warming melts the polar ice cover in the Arctic, an international peace research group said Monday.
Researchers expect the North Pole to be ice free during summer months in a matter of decades, opening up new shipping lanes and potential resource exploration in an area believed to contain as much as a quarter of the world's undiscovered oil and gas.
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The latest findings from research on Antarctica's rich marine life are presented this week at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Marine Biologist Huw Griffiths from British Antarctic Survey (BAS) is involved in a major international investigation into the distribution and abundance of Antarctica's vast marine biodiversity -- the Census of Antarctic Marine Life (CAML).
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The same antifreeze proteins that keep organisms from freezing in cold environments also can prevent ice from melting at warmer temperatures, according to a new Ohio University and Queen's University study published today in the Early Edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Climactic changes might currently be threatening the survival of polar bears (Ursus maritimus), but similar shifts appear to have played an important part in bringing the species into existence in the not too distant past.
Researchers announced today that they have sequenced the mitochondrial genome of an ancient polar bear. The genetic traces they found in the bear's 110,000- to 130,000-year-old jawbone reveal that the species likely split from brown bears (U.arctos) just 150,000 years ago, at a time when specializing in arctic living quickly became an advantage rather than a liability.
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