El Nino and La Nina, the climate's two enfants terribles, arise with the onset of eastward migration of the tropical western Pacific's immense warm-water reservoir, the "warm pool." IRD researchers and their partners1 recently found two parameters useful for observing the way this pool moves: water salinity and colour.
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The northern Scandinavian landscape is dotted with fjords, lingonberries and, if you believe some locals, elves. But another sight is increasingly common on the Arctic horizon: data centers.
Drawn by the promise of lower electricity costs, a growing number of tech companies are harnessing the region's abundant cold air to cool their servers, cutting expensive air-conditioning out of the equation.
Facebook, the latest tech company to take the polar plunge, announced this week that it will build a data center just south of the Arctic Circle in Lulea, Sweden, where the average low in January is 3 degrees Fahrenheit.
The facility, a set of three 300,000 square foot buildings, is the social networking site's first data center outside the U.S. It's scheduled to be operational by 2012.
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A new Great Game is making a quiet appearance in Canada’s Arctic.
In a speech Friday in Beijing, the Danish ambassador to China, Friis Arne Peterson, said the communist country has “natural and legitimate economic and scientific interests in the Arctic” even though it lacks a coastline in the rapidly thawing polar region.
He went on to say that his government would like to see China given permanent observer status in the eight-member Arctic Council, which currently includes Canada, Russia, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Sweden and the United States. China has applied to become a permanent observer in the forum.
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New research from the University of Missouri indicates that Atlantic Ocean temperatures during the greenhouse climate of the Late Cretaceous Epoch were influenced by circulation in the deep ocean. These changes in circulation patterns 70 million years ago could help scientists understand the consequences of modern increases in greenhouse gases.
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Solar radiation management is a class of theoretical concepts for manipulating the climate in order to reduce the risks of global warming caused by greenhouse gasses. But its potential effectiveness and risks are uncertain, and it is unclear whether tests could help narrow these uncertainties. A team composed of Caltech's Doug MacMynowski, Carnegie's Ken Caldeira and Ho-Jeong Shin, and Harvard's David Keith used modeling to determine the type of testing that might be effective in the future.
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Circumpolar countries want to make sure the polar bear will survive in a changing Arctic.
Two years from now, Canada will work with Norway, Russia, the U.S. and Greenland on an international plan to protect and research the animals.
First, countries will complete their own management plans.
One of the last presentations was from an Iqaluit elder and member of the Qikiqtaaluk Wildlife Board.
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The Russian Ministry of Transport is ordering four new icebreakers worth a total of 79 billion RUB (1.8 billion EUR).
A contract on the construction of the vessels will be signed in November this year, Deputy Minister Viktor Olersky told Itar-Tass. The contract partner is the United Shipbuilding Corporation.
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Climate scientists say the world's target to stay below a global warming of 2 degrees, made at the United Nations conference in Copenhagen in 2009 and Cancun 2010 will require decisive action this decade.
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Updates for the Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere Response Experiment (COARE) physically based meteorological and gas transfer bulk flux algorithms are examined. The current versions are summarized and a generalization of the gas transfer codes to 79 gases is described. The current meteorological version COARE3.0 was compared with a collection of 26,700 covariance observations of drag and heat transfer coefficients (compiled from three independent research groups). The algorithm agreed on average to within 5% with observations for a wind speed range of 2 to 18 m s-1. Covariance observations of CO2 and dimethyl sulfide (DMS) gas transfer velocity k were normalized to Schmidt number 660 and compared to an ensemble of gas flux observations from six research groups and nine field programs.
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Global warming is real, according to a major study released Oct. 20. Despite issues raised by climate change skeptics, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study finds reliable evidence of a rise in the average world land temperature of approximately 1°C since the mid-1950s.
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Land surface air temperature trends observed during 1979–2008 are compared with those simulated by the 20th Century Reanalysis that is driven only by observed sea surface temperatures and sea ice, atmospheric CO2 concentrations, solar and volcanic forcings, and surface pressure data. On a global annual average, the 20th Century Reanalysis simulates a little more than 80% of the observed trend, but with substantial regional and seasonal variations. The remainder of the trend may be ascribed tentatively to land use changes, aerosol increases and decreases, and changes in minor greenhouse gases not accounted for in the 20th Century Reanalysis.
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A controlling factor in the seasonal and climatological evolution of the sea ice cover is its albedo a. Here we analyze Arctic data from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) Polar Pathfinder and assess the seasonality and variability of broadband albedo from a 23 year daily record. We produce a histogram of daily albedo over ice covered regions in which the principal albedo transitions are seen; high albedo in late winter and spring, the onset of snowmelt and melt pond formation in the summer, and fall freezeup. The bimodal late summer distribution demonstrates the combination of the poleward progression of the onset of melt with the coexistence of perennial bare ice with melt ponds and open water, which then merge to a broad peak at a > 0.5.
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We show the first results of a large-scale survey of snow depth on Arctic sea ice from NASA's Operation IceBridge snow radar system for the 2009 season and compare the data to climatological snow depth values established over the 1954–1991 time period. For multiyear ice, the mean radar derived snow depth is 33.1 cm and the corresponding mean climatological snow depth is 33.4 cm. The small mean difference suggests consistency between contemporary estimates of snow depth with the historical climatology for the multiyear ice region of the Arctic. A 16.5 cm mean difference (climatology minus radar) is observed for first year ice areas suggesting that the increasingly seasonal sea ice cover of the Arctic Ocean has led to an overall loss of snow as the region has transitioned away from a dominantly multiyear ice cover.
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A common argument against global warming is that the climate has always varied. "Temperatures rise sometimes and this is perfectly natural," is the usual line. However, Svante Björck, a climate researcher at Lund University in Sweden, has now shown that global warming, i.e. simultaneous warming events in the northern and southern hemispheres, have not occurred in the past 20 000 years, which is as far back as it is possible to analyse with sufficient precision to compare with modern developments.
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Russia is known for its domes, which generally sit on top of Orthodox churches. Soon, one might be on top of the world in Russia’s neck of the Arctic, this time sitting atop a city. During the Arctic: Territory of Dialogue conference last month in Murmansk, Putin reviewed plans and mock-ups for a a 5,000-person domed village in the Arctic called Umka, named after a popular cartoon polar bear in Russia. The village would be tiny, covering only 1.2 square kilometers of land on Kotelny, the largest of the New Siberian Islands. Yet despite its small size, the Daily Mail quoted architect Valery Rzhevskiy as saying, “This city will be of strategic importance as Russia’s northern outpost.” In fact, lying 1,000 miles from the North Pole, Umka would become Russia’s northernmost settlement, though it would still fall shy of the record. That belongs to Alert, Nunavut, a permanently inhabited weather station and military intelligence facility 508 miles from the North Pole. However, Alert only has five permanent residents, so Umka would have a population one thousand times larger.
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Arctic ice shelves may disappear in the future, although the ice masses already broke up 1,400 years ago and refroze 600 years later, according to new research.
The current vanishing of the Arctic ice has been highly publicized, but new research suggests that at least one ice shelf, the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, had a history of breaking up 1,400 years ago and only completely reformed 800 years ago.
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A major new study has reanalyzed the connection between global warming and the record-breaking temperatures we’ve been seeing. Stefan Rahmstorf and Dim Coumou conclude in their PNAS paper, “Increase of extreme events in a warming world“:
… the majority of monthly records like the Moscow heat wave must be considered due to the warming trend. In highly aggregated data with small variability compared to the trend, like the global-mean temperature, almost all recent records are due to climate warming.
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Russia’s biggest state oil and gas companies "Rosneft" and "Gazprom" have got new competitors when it comes to exploration of the continental shelf. The state program includes a list of companies applying for licenses.
According to the Ministry of Natural Resources "Gazprom" and "Rosneft" prior to 2030, will spend about $7,5 billion on exploration in the oil areas. This way "Gazprom" will increase its reserves up to 11 billion tons of fuel and "Rosneft" up to 4 billion tons
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The companies Dolphin Geophysics and TGS are collecting 3D seismic data from a 1500 square km big area in the Barents Sea.
The mapping takes place in an area north of the North Cape
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In order to complete work package 5 of SIOS information on field stations, equipment and infrastructure is needed. For that your help is needed.
Piotr Glowacki - Responsible for WP5 has send out the following letter to all SIOS partners. If your institution has not filled in the questionnaire please help to see that it is done.
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A Russian-Icelandic business forum, organized by Russia’s Trade and Industry Chamber and Iceland’s embassy in Russia, will be held in Moscow on Tuesday, Russia’s Federal Tourism Agency (Rosturizm) said.
The two countries are expected to sign an intergovernmental agreement on cooperation in tourism at the forum.
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Due to the 2008-2009 economic crisis global CO2emissions decreased for the first time since 1990, but a large rebound is anticipated in 2010
While carbon dioxide emissions in non-Annex I countries continued to grow in 2009 (+3.3%), emissions of Annex I countries fell sharply (-6.5%), according to a new publication from the International Energy Agency. Most of the reduction, however, comes from a decrease in the energy consumption due to the 2008-2009 economic crisis.
Statistics for 2009 show that emission levels for the group of countries participating in the Kyoto Protocol – a multinational agreement to mitigate climate change – were just shy of 15% below their 1990 level.
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The Moscow heat wave last year was, with high probability, the result of climate change – contrary to what some have assumed. With a likelihood of 80 percent, it was not natural short-term climatic variability but the long-term warming trend that caused the temperature record in the region surrounding the Russian capital in July 2010, according to scientists of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). They developed a formula for calculating how frequently weather extremes occur in a changing climate. This week their findings are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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NOAA is now using a sophisticated forecast model that substantially improves predictions of space weather impacts on Earth. Better forecasts offer additional protection for people and the technology-based infrastructure we use daily.
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The High North was one of the issues up for discussion when Norway’s Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg med with U.S. President Barack Obama in the White House on Thursday.
The two leaders discussed possibilities for cooperation in the Arctic Ocean, especially on fields like emergency preparedness and search and rescue operations. - The U.S. looks at the development in the High North with great interest, and wants to develop our cooperation, also within the oil and gas sector, Stoltenberg said after the meeting.
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The Canadian government has cut three quarters of the University of the Arctic’s budget, forcing the organization to scale down its operations in Canada.
The funding cut — from a total of more than $700,000 down to about $150,000 — means Canada will lose the office it hosted at the University of Saskatchewan, which was staffed by University of the Arctic's dean of undergraduate studies.
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Wildfire, insect outbreaks and hurricanes destroy huge amounts of forest every year and increase the amount of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere, but scientists are now learning more about another force that can significantly affect their climate impact.
Researchers conclude in a new study that the albedo effect, which controls the amount of energy reflected back into space, is important in the climatic significance of several types of major forest disturbances.
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NASA has released a series of new satellite data visualizations that show tens of millions of fires detected worldwide from space since 2002. The visualizations show fire observations made by the MODerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, or MODIS, instruments onboard NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites.
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NASA and Japan released a significantly improved version of the most complete digital topographic map of Earth on Oct. 17, produced with detailed measurements from NASA's Terra spacecraft.
The map, known as a global digital elevation model, was created from images collected by the Japanese Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer, or ASTER, instrument aboard Terra.
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The Antarctic ozone hole, which yawns wide every Southern Hemisphere spring, reached its annual peak on September 12, stretching 10.05 million square miles, the ninth largest on record. Above the South Pole, the ozone hole reached its deepest point of the season on October 9 when total ozone readings dropped to 102 Dobson units, tied for the 10th lowest in the 26-year record.
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Svalbard Science Forum, in cooperation with the Norwegian Polar Institute, will award Arctic Field Grants in connection with research projects in Svalbard and Jan Mayen in 2012.
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Rounding the northernmost tip of Russia in his oceangoing tugboat this summer, Capt. Vladimir V. Bozanov saw plenty of walruses, some pods of beluga whales and in the distance a few icebergs.
One thing Captain Bozanov did not encounter while towing an industrial barge 2,300 miles across the Arctic Ocean was solid ice blocking his path anywhere along the route. Ten years ago, he said, an ice-free passage, even at the peak of summer, was exceptionally rare.
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The federal government has cut three quarters of the University of the Arctic’s budget, forcing the organization to scale down its operations in Canada.
The online university was created in 2001 and has more than 120 institutions across the circumpolar world, 33 of which are in Canada. It has had more than 10,000 registrations for its courses since 2002.
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Industrial chemicals are being transported from the industrialized world to the Arctic via air and sea currents. Here, the cocktail of environmental toxins is absorbed by the sea's food chains, of which the polar bear is the top predator.
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A Trans-Arctic fiber optic line connecting Tokyo and London is planned to go through Murmansk.
The Russian company Polarnet Project plans the construction of a Russian trans-Arctic cable line, Rotax, with the cost of nearly $2 billion. The Governmental Commission for Federal Communications and Technological Issues approved the project last Friday.
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The Russian government intends to spend 1.13 billion rubles on research in the Arctic and Antarctic, environmental monitoring and infrastructure development, the Russian Finance Ministry said on its website.
Under a new budget spending plan, in 2012 Russia will spend 456.5 million rubles on research, the construction of communication systems, environment monitoring and other projects under the Arctic Development subprogram. In 2013, 370.07 million rubles will be spent.
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The Arctic Frontiers (AFT) conference is a central arena for discussions of arctic issues. The conference brings together representatives from science, politics, and civil society to share perspectives on how upcoming challenges in the Arctic may be addressed to ensure sustainable development.
Arctic Frontiers (AFT) holds its 6th annual conference in Tromsø from 22-27 January 2012, Norway, with the title “Energies of the High North”. Arctic Frontiers 2012 will discuss the global energy outlook, and assess the potential of traditional and renewable energy resources in the North.
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The 2012 election is heating up, and the issues at stake are more relevant than ever. A number of them are incredibly important to our generation- youth unemployment, deficits, education, student loan debt, foreign policy, and more. We’re breaking them down, giving them context, discussing possible solutions, interviewing experts, and- above all- showcasing the takes of students nationwide. Welcome to ‘NextGen Policy’- a NGJ special series. In the arena today: climate change.
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The Joint Norwegian-Russian Fisheries Commission has released a website to help spread information about the fisheries cooperation between the two countries.
The website www.jointfish.com was opened during the 40 session in the Joint Norwegian-Russian Fisheries Commission in Kaliningrad last week.
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Rising sea levels in the coming centuries is perhaps one of the most catastrophic consequences of rising temperatures. Massive economic costs, social consequences and forced migrations could result from global warming. But how frightening of times are we facing? Researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute are part of a team that has calculated the long-term outlook for rising sea levels in relation to the emission of greenhouse gases and pollution of the atmosphere using climate models.
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Arctech Helsinki Shipyard has started construction of two new icebreakers for Russia’s largest shipping company Sovcomflot.
The two Multifunctional Icebreaking Supply Vessels (MIBSV) are planned to be ready by spring 2013 and will be used as supply vessels for Exxon Neftegas’ platform at the Sakhalin-1 field
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Summer hydrographic data (1920–2009) show a dramatic warming of the bottom water layer over the eastern Siberian shelf coastal zone (<10 m depth), since the mid-1980s, by 2.1°C. We attribute this warming to changes in the Arctic atmosphere. The enhanced summer cyclonicity results in warmer air temperatures and a reduction in ice extent, mainly through thermodynamic melting. This leads to a lengthening of the summer open-water season and to more solar heating of the water column.
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A pioneering British expedition to sample a lake under the Antarctic ice hopes to find unknown forms of life and clues to future climate impacts.
The mission will use hot water to melt its way through ice 3km (2 miles) thick to reach Lake Ellsworth, which has been isolated from the outside world for at least 125,000 years - maybe a million.
The team hopes to be the first to sample a sub-glacial Antarctic lake.
An engineering team leaves the UK later this week along with 70 tonnes of gear.
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Polar bears in Svalbard are reclaiming denning areas that were abandoned prior to their complete protection in 1973.
A recent study by researchers at the Norwegian Polar institute looks into polar bear denning data from 1973 to 2010. Encouragingly it clearly shows that the 1973 hunting ban on bears have had a positive effect on the distribution of dens in the archipelago. While most of the denning still takes place in the east more and more bears are born in locations that have not been used for denning in decades. Presumably the dens were abandoned due to the massive hunting pressure in the northern and western part of Svalbard.
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Dutch researchers rediscovered an abandoned marble quarry at Blomstranden this summer.
A report from The Northern Exploration Company LTD from 1920 entitled: Report on various marble properties in Spitsbergen was uncovered in the archives of the Norwegian Polar Institute in Tromsø. This was part of the master thesis work for Frigga Kruse from Arctic Centre of the University of Groningen in The Netherlands who is studying studying British prospecting and mining on Spitsbergen.
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CCGS Amundsen – It’s past midnight; below freezing; and wind-driven snow whips up the side of the Coast Guard ship Amundsen, delivering non-stop stinging upper cuts to those near the rail.
A screeching winch hauls a 730-kilogram “box core” from the icy Beaufort Sea and swings it above the deck. Scientists and crew manhandle the dripping metal contraption into position, undo stubborn bolts and remove its cap, revealing a cube of mud, about a metre on each side.
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Rivers and streams in the United States are releasing enough carbon into the atmosphere to fuel 3.4 million car trips to the moon, according to Yale researchers in Nature Geoscience. Their findings could change the way scientists model the movement of carbon between land, water and the atmosphere.
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Emissions of the main greenhouse gases, reactive gaseous and particulate chemical compounds have been inventoried over the period 1850-2300 by an international collaboration involving scientists from the Laboratoire "Atmosphères, Milieux, Observations Spatiales" (CNRS/UPMC/UVSQ)(1) and the Laboratoire d'Aérologie (CNRS/Université Paul Sabatier)(2). This quantification has enabled researchers to propose four new scenarios that will be used in future climatic simulations of the 5th IPCC report, due in 2013.
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Earth's largest mass extinction event, the end-Permian mass extinction, occurred some 252 million years ago. An estimated 90 percent of Earth's marine life was eradicated. To better understand the cause of this "mother of all mass extinctions," researchers from Arizona State University and the University of Cincinnati used a new geochemical technique. The team measured uranium isotopes in ancient carbonate rocks and found that a large, rapid shift in the chemistry of the world's ancient oceans occurred around the extinction event.
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Scientists with NASA's Operation IceBridge airborne research campaign began the mission's third year of surveys this week over the changing ice of Antarctica.
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The traditional method for interpolating ice thickness data from airborne radar sounding surveys onto regular grids is to employ geostatistical techniques such as kriging. While this approach provides continuous maps of ice thickness, it generates products that are not consistent with ice flow dynamics and are impractical for high resolution ice flow simulations. Here, we present a novel approach that combines sparse ice thickness data collected by airborne radar sounding profilers with high resolution swath mapping of ice velocity derived from satellite synthetic-aperture interferometry to obtain a high resolution map of ice thickness that conserves mass and minimizes the departure from observations.
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The most dangerous environmental pollutants on Franz Josef Land will be removed and recycled in the first place as part of a major cleanup of the Arctic, Marina Nekrasova, leading research associate of the Production Forces’ Research Council (SOPS) said.
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As the Arctic thaws, can science help to chart a sustainable path for the north?
Last winter, parts of the Canadian Arctic basked in record-breaking warmth. In the town of Coral Harbour, at the mouth of Hudson Bay, temperatures rose above freezing for a few days in January for the first time ever. Across the Arctic, extreme climate conditions are becoming the norm, even as the region faces other profound changes, such as the growing political power of indigenous peoples and the race to extract mineral resources
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Getting to grips with a changing polar landscape.
The Arctic covers around 5% of the planet's surface, but it is capturing a disproportionate amount of attention. With temperatures rising at twice the global rate, the region's summer sea ice is shrinking rapidly, making access easier than ever before. At the same time, countries are racing to claim parts of the Arctic's sea floor and the vast deposits of hydrocarbons that lie beneath it.
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Based on comprehensive measurements of carbonate system parameters in sea ice, brines, and surface waters across a variety of ice types in the eastern Beaufort Sea during November and December of 2007, the newly forming sea ice appeared to release CO2. Not only was pCO2 high within the ice, but high salinities and inorganic carbon concentrations in the surface waters directly below the ice and in frost flowers above the ice indicated that brines and CO2 were moving out of the ice as it was forming. In addition, relative to salinity, the ice was generally enriched in alkalinity but depleted in total inorganic carbon. These observations support the hypothesis that as sea ice forms, increasing brine concentrations and CaCO3 precipitation release CO2.
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Global economics, not declining sea ice, is driving ships to the Arctic Ocean. Only international regulation will protect the region, says Lawson Brigham.
Most people know that profound change is happening in the Arctic Ocean. Most people would say that this is because the sea ice there is in retreat. But most people would be wrong.
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At the Arctic Future Symposium 2011, organized by the Internatinal Polar Foundation with the support of the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation, Commissioner Maria Damanaki highlighted the need for ensuring that the emerging industrialisation and exploitation of Arctic resources follow the highest environmental and safety standards, respect the Arctic indigenous communities and is accessible to all business on a level playing field.
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Mention prime geography for generation of solar energy, and people tend to think of hot deserts. But a new study concludes that some of the world's coldest landscapes -- including the Himalaya Mountains, the Andes, and even Antarctica -- could become Saudi Arabias of solar. The research appears in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology.
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KIRUNA: Economic and industrial development, protection of the environment and people-to-people cooperation are the main priorities for Norway’s chairmanship in the Barents Euro-Arctic Council.
- The people-to-people cooperation is what makes the Barents region unique, said Støre after receiving the chairmanship gavel from Bildt. - One of the greatest achievements in the 18 years long history of the Barents cooperation is the normalization of human contact across the borders.
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A political candidate's electoral victory or defeat is influenced by his or her stance on climate change policy, according to new Stanford University studies of the most recent presidential and congressional elections.
"These studies are a coordinated effort looking at whether candidates' statements on climate change translated into real votes," said Jon Krosnick, professor of communication and of political science at Stanford, who led two new studies
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We intend to strengthen our cooperation in the High North with joint initiatives both on land and in the air, Norwegian Chief of Defence said after his historical visit to Moscow yesterday.
It is the first time ever that a Norwegian Chief of Defence visits Russia. On the invitation of his Russian counterpart, General Harald Sunde this week paid a visit to Moscow.
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Having the world's longest Arctic coastline, Russia lays claim to the greatest volume of undeveloped hydrcarbon reserves in the world - a 21st Century "sweet spot" if you will. So this month, SPE, together with Reed Exhibitions, invites specialists from around the world to Moscow for its first Arctic & Extreme Environments Exhibition & Conference. The event takes place 18 to 20 October in the All-Russian Exhibition Center.
The three-day expo will host representatives of dozens of Russian and foreign oil companies and service companies including BP, Rosneft, Total, Gasprom, Halliburton, Baker Hughes and others.
The conference is co-chaired by TNK-BP deputy president Sergei Brezitsky and professor of Gubkin Russian State University of Oil and Gas Anatoly Zolotukhin. “We would like to address issues during this conference, to address, rather then resolve,” Zolotukhin said in in his welcoming video address to the conference, posted on its official site.
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Over 400,000 oil drums must be scrapped and collapsing depots and leaking fuel depots must be removed in order to ecologically rehabilitate the Arctic archipelago Franz Josef Land.
This means that over 27,000 tons of waste metal must be scrapped. This was said on Thursday at a news conference, devoted to first results of an expedition to the archipelago within the framework of the “Ecological Rehabilitation of the Arctic Region” programme.
The main environmental problem of the region is hundreds of thousands of metal barrels for petroleum products, tons of metal scrap and different kinds of broken down hardware.
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Louis W. Uccellini, Ph.D., director of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction for NOAA’s National Weather Service in Camp Springs, Md., has been named president-elect of the American Meteorological Society. His term begins in 2012.
“The AMS has a long history of electing internationally recognized leaders in the atmospheric and related sciences to its presidency, and Uccellini is an excellent example of that as he comes into the president-elect position this January,” said Keith Seitter, executive director of the AMS.
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Watch several decades worth of ice thickness data, as the oldest, thickest ice – the whitest shade, is steadily broken down and flushed out of the arctic, to disappear in the open ocean. The pulsing of the winter to summer cycle is like the beating of a cold polar heart.
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UNIS offers courses at the undergraduate and graduate level in four fields: Arctic Biology (AB), Arctic Geology (AG), Arctic Geophysics (AGF) and Arctic Technology (AT).
Full semester studies are available at the undergraduate level (200-level). At the graduate level (300-level) UNIS offers shorter and more intensive courses spanning from a few weeks up to a semester.
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In recent decades, Arctic sea ice has suffered a dramatic decline that exceeds climate model predictions. The unexpected rate of ice shrinkage has now been explained by researchers at CNRS, Université Joseph Fourier and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They argue that climate models underestimate the rate of ice thinning, which is actually about four times faster than calculations. This model bias is due to the poor representation of the sea ice southward drift out of the Arctic basin through the Fram Strait. When this mechanism was taken into account to correct the discrepancy between simulations and observations, results from the new model suggested that there will be no Arctic sea ice in summer by the end of the century.
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The Baltic Sea emits more carbon dioxide than it can bind. Local variations have increased the exposure of the Bay of Bothnia. These are the results from a study of how carbon dioxide flows between the water of the Baltic Sea and the atmosphere, carried out by scientists at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
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The 3D seismic vessel Polarcus Alima recently transited from Norway to New Zealand through the Northern Sea Route.
The vessel began the passage from Hammerfest on September 15 after completion of seismic operations in the Barents Sea. The ship followed the 3,000 nautical mile NSR along the northern coast of Russia to Cape Dezhnev in the Bering Straits.
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Oil and gas fields containing immense reserves have been found in the Russian section of the Arctic sea-shelf
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Norway will use more money on petroleum activities and security issues in the High North. This became evident through the state budget that was presented on Thursday.
The Norwegian Government allocates NOK 180 million (€23 million) to seismic exploration near Jan Mayen and in the newly established border area to Russia in the Barents Sea. This is nearly 30 percent more than the previous year. In addition, another NOK 84 million (€10,7 million) goes to seismic explorations and collection of data in the Norwegian Sea and the southern parts of the Barents Sea.
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As Earth’s climate cycles between warm and cool periods, species often must move to stay within suitable conditions. Scientists have now mapped how fast species have had to migrate in the past to keep up with changing climate. They found that small-ranged species – which constitute much of Earth’s biodiversity – are concentrated in regions where little migration has been required. Climate change due to human activities will drastically increase the required migration rates in many of these locations, putting their unique faunas at risk.
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A technology commonly used to map the bottom of the deep ocean can also detect gas seeps in the water column with remarkably high fidelity, according to scientists from the University of New Hampshire and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). This finding, made onboard the NOAA ship Okeanos Explorer in the Gulf of Mexico, will lead to more effective mapping of these gas seeps and, ultimately, enhanced understanding of our ocean environments.
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Spanish researchers have discovered a rare mollusc in Antarctic waters that looks the same as limpets but is bigger in size than the species known to date. The specimen appeared in waters much further away from where this type of species is normally found.
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The Russian state Fishery Directorate wants to discuss the situation in the Fisheries Protection Zone around Svalbard at the next meeting in the Norwegian-Russian Joint Fishery Commission.
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In the central Arctic the proportion of old, thick sea ice has declined significantly. Instead, the ice cover now largely consists of thin, one-year-old floes. This is one of the results that scientists of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association brought back from the 26th Arctic expedition of the research vessel Polarstern.
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The research vessel “Johan Hjort” arrived to port in Kirkenes this week ending the 2011 joint Norwegian, Russian ecosystem cruise. Three Norwegian vessels operated by the Institute of Marine Research and the Russian research vessel “Vilnius” operated by Pinro have examined minutely the Barents Sea from south to north, from east to west.
The researchers were surprised by catching of Northeast Atlantic cod as far north as 82 degrees.
- We have been sailing the waters east of Svalbard, and also there we found large amounts of cod far more north than normal
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Last month the extent of sea ice covering the Arctic Ocean declined to the second-lowest extent on record. Satellite data from NASA and the NASA-supported National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado in Boulder showed that the summertime sea ice cover narrowly avoided a new record low.
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The Finnish Meteorological Institute has developed a new, globally unique method for estimating surface albedo in the Arctic sea area solely on the basis of microwave data. Its advantage over conventional optical methods is that neither clouds nor darkness interfere with measurements.
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Polar bears will be affected by climate change in the Arctic and Antarctic, but so will India's iconic tigers and elephants. Researchers from Norway, India, Germany and Chile are joining forces to understand what is happening in polar oceans -- and what can be done.
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Scandinavian shipowners say cargo routes through the Arctic, made possible by warmer temperatures, would save money and emissions
Supertankers and giant cargo ships could next year travel regularly between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans via the Arctic to save time, money and emissions, say Scandinavian shipowners.
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Fancy a cruise to the north pole? This year, thanks to global warming thinning the sea ice in the Arctic Ocean, Russian icebreakers expect to take hundreds of holidaymakers to the northernmost place on Earth - for a cool $30,000 each.
The first icebreakers reached the pole in 1994, and last year seven ships reached it. But if the ice continues its expected rate of melt, tankers, cruise liners and container ships will all be able to knock 5,000 miles off the usual route from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean by sailing straight over the pole within about 30 years, says the Canadian government.
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Russia’s subpolar regions may find themselves affected by a newly discovered hole in the ozone layer above the Arctic, according to the British science weekly Nature. The journal reported that the depletion of the ozone layer this year is the most serious on record and that the hole is likely to expand even further.
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The ship will be frozen into ice and drift along with it. Due to the specific profile of the hull, ice pressure will only push the ship up without damaging it.
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Russia signed an agreement on Tuesday on international funding for co-financing nature conservation projects operating under the Arctic Council.
The agreement was signed by Russia's Natural Resources Minister Yury Trutnev and Managing Director of Nordic Environment Finance Corporation (NEFCO) Magnus Rystedt.
This agreement started the work of the first international fund for co-financing nature conservation projects operating under the Arctic Council. The aim of the fund, the Project Support Instrument (PSI), is to finance Arctic Council member states helping to protect the Arctic environment. Russia was the first Arctic Council member state to accept the new instrument.
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Russia’s global navigation satellite system Glonass is now fully operational and can provide global cover.
The 24th satellite in the system was successfully launched from the Plesetsk space center outside Arkhangelsk and put into orbit in the early hours of Monday
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A new Russian manned drifting weather station started operating in the Arctic Ocean on Saturday.
The Severny Polyus-39 (SP-39) floating station officially began its work after a ceremony to hoist the Russian flag on Saturday afternoon. The station has already sent its first weather report.
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In 1875, an Austrian geophysicist named Karl Weyprecht proposed polar stations to conduct year-round observations using consistent methods and instruments...
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A huge hole that appeared in the Earth's protective ozone layer above the Arctic in 2011 was the largest recorded in the Northern Hemisphere, triggering worries the event could occur again and be even worse, scientists said in a report on Monday.
The ozone layer high in the stratosphere acts like a giant shield against the Sun's ultraviolet (UV) radiation, which can cause skin cancers and cataracts.
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After talks at the International Arctic Forum last week, Russian authorities announced transport and rescue programs in the region, organizers said in a statement on Monday.
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Last month’s phytoplankton bloom colored the surface of the Barents Sea brilliantly blue and green.
Phytoplankton is responsible for a much of the primary production in the Barents Sea but are often too small to be seen by the naked eye. However in large numbers they can color large expanses of ocean and can even be visible from space.
The milky blue color of this bloom suggests that it is mostly composed of coccolithophores, microscopic plankton plated with white calcium carbonate. The differences in color may be due to differences in depth and concentration, or the presence of sediments or other species of phytoplankton, particularly diatoms.
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A new Russian manned drifting weather station started operating in the Arctic Ocean on Saturday.
The Severny Polyus-39 (SP-39) floating station officially began its work after a ceremony to hoist the Russian flag on Saturday afternoon. The station has already sent its first weather report.
SP-39 has a crew of 16 specialists, including marine and ice scientists, hydrologists and meteorologists.
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Russia's leaders called an Arctic neighborhood meeting last week to make one thing clear: they see opportunities posed by global demand for Arctic resources, receding sea ice, and the North's strategic location.
They're ready to pounce. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, chair of the Russian Geographical Society, summoned a bevy of Arctic hands to Arkhangelsk to tell us this:
-Russia intends to make the Northern Sea Route, which passes Alaska's front door, as important to global shipping and commerce as the Suez Canal. Major tanker loads of oil products, gas condensate and mineral ores have come our way already.
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This summer, thanks to financing from the Arctic Field Grant, PhD student Kim Senger has measured the strike and dip of 2279 fractures in a cliffside near Deltaneset. Find out how and why by reading his field report here
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This week Maria Luisa Avila Jimenez defended her PhD thesis on the role and origin of Arctic invertebrates after the last glacial maximum in Svalbard.
The thesis is entitled “High Arctic Invertebrate Biogeography: Patterns and Colonization Processes since the Last Glacial Maximum” and is a corporation between the University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS) and the University of Bergen.
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