The U.S. missile defense program is becoming less predictable with missile shield elements deployed in the Arctic as the worst-case scenario, Russia's envoy to NATO told the Vesti 24 channel.
U.S. President Barack Obama has announced that Washington would not deploy its missile shield elements in Central Europe, due to a re-assessment of the threat from Iran. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said on Saturday he decided against deploying Iskander missiles in Russia's Kaliningrad Region, near Poland.
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Canada, Norway and Russia will soon provide navigation and meteorological warnings for ships crossing the Arctic sea, a new maritime route which has opened up due to global warming, a WMO expert said Wednesday.
A revised Manual on Maritime Safety Information which is to come into force in 2011 now includes the Arctic as a new zone, divided into five areas where weather warnings would have to be provided.
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Unusually high temperatures in the Arctic and heavy rains in the tropics likely drove a global increase in atmospheric methane in 2007 and 2008 after a decade of near-zero growth, according to a new study. Methane is the second most abundant greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide, albeit a distant second.
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Gazprom has finished building of a 4 km long bridge on the Yamal peninsula. The bridge runs through one of the most difficult areas on the route for the new railway to the Bovanekovo gas field.
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When scientists from the United Kingdom and the United States set out to find evidence of a link between carbon dioxide levels and the formation of ice caps in Antarctica some 34 million years ago, they went to a remote village in Tanzania. .They and other scientists believed there might be fossil evidence to such a link from the Eocene-Oligocene climate transition, when carbon dioxide levels were low and ice caps began rapidly forming on the continent.
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As northern Europe enjoys a rather warm start to autumn, an international team of 20 polar scientists have brought icy winter conditions to the middle of Hamburg, Germany. They are studying the effect of pack ice on carbon dioxide and instead of travelling to the Arctic or Antarctic they have reproduced realistic ice conditions closer to home.
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Russia must speed up the development of the Northern Sea Route before climate change makes it possible to use the North East Passage outside the Russian 200 miles zone, says Governor of Arkhangelsk Oblast Ilya Mikhailchuk.
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Arctic Science and Politics will be highlighted at the Rovaniemi seminar that marks the anniversary.
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IThe LARsen Ice Shelf System, Antarctica (LARISSA) project is an NSF-funded interdisciplinary project that will try to study as many aspects as possible of ice shelf ecosystems on the heels of the 2002 collapse of the Larsen B Ice Shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula. Researchers will lead field studies to understand the origin of the collapse, going back thousands of years in climate history in an attempt to determine whether its origins are to be found in a longer natural cycle or in the extreme warming in the area.
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A new study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder indicates most of the world's low-lying river deltas are sinking from human activity, making them increasingly vulnerable to flooding from rivers and ocean storms and putting tens of millions of people at risk.
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A comprehensive satellite survey of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets has revealed an extensive network of rapidly thinning glaciers that is driving ice loss in the regions.
The most profound loss of ice was seen along the continental coastlines, where glaciers speed up as they slip into the sea. In some regions, glaciers flowing into surrounding waters were thinning by nearly 10m a year.
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In a search for alternatives to the famed ice roads of the Arctic, Canadian officials are looking to use massive airships for moving freight across the frozen north.
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The International Chamber of Shipping (ICS) has launched a new internet website – www.shippingandco2.org to explain what the shipping industry and the IMO are doing to deliver a significant reduction in shipping’s CO2 emissions. The launch of the site coincides with IMO World Maritime Day (24 September) - the theme of which is ‘Climate Change - A Challenge for IMO Too’.
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Russian and U.S. oceanographers studying the impact of global warming on the Bering Strait in late August enjoyed seas on some days that were so calm their ship made the only ripples.
But the serenity of the seascape belied increasingly turbulent waters for scientific research as countries exert sovereignty over Arctic territory and Big Oil boosts exploration efforts.
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Ice on the Arctic Ocean has started to expand after a summer thaw to the third smallest area on record allowed ships to test a new sea route past north Russia.
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A team of scientists led by U of C grad Casey Hubert has detected high numbers of heat loving, or thermophilic, bacteria in subzero sediments in the Arctic Ocean off the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen. The bacterial spores might provide a unique opportunity to trace seepages of fluids from hot sub-seafloor habitats, possibly pointing towards undiscovered offshore petroleum reservoirs.
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The Arctic sea ice cover appears to have reached its minimum extent for the year, the third-lowest recorded since satellites began measuring sea ice extent in 1979, according to the University of Colorado at Boulder's National Snow and Ice Data Center.
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Foreign Minister Alexander Stubb will present Finland’s Arctic Strategy later this month.
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This is the second period Ingerø is Governor of Svalbard. First time was from 2001 to 2005. Odd Olsen-Ingerø was Chief of Police in the Norwegian border town Kirkenes, and by that got good experience in cooperating with Russian authorities.
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SPARC investigates Sensitivity of Permafrost in the Arctic. A group of researchers has recently made field measurements in Bayelva catchment near Ny-Ålesund. Depending on the snow depth the soil temperature at 1.5m depth at different locations differed by up to five degrees during winter.
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Lake Vida is a geologic oddity in Antarctica. A lake with water five to seven times as salty as sea water covered by about 20 metres (60 feet) of ice year-round, was discovered in 2002 to have 2,800 year-old cryobiological microbes that were able to be revived after being thawed out.
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For the first time, a major study recently published in Nature, has linked declining CO2 levels in the Earth's atmosphere 34 million years ago with the formation of the Antarctic Ice Sheet.
Scientists from Cardiff, Bristol and Texas A&M Universities looked at microfossils in rock samples taken from a small village in Tanzania. Using a newly-developed technique devised by Dr. Gavin Foster from the University of Bristol, scientists were able to reconstruct the composition of the atmosphere across the Eocene-Oligocene boundary about 34 million years ago.
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The North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling (NEEM) project kicked off in 2007 and seeks to describe the planet's past climate by analysing the gases and particulate matter trapped inside the region's ice cores. This year, the team bested records from previous expeditions to the Greenland ice sheet, drilling down through 1758 metres by the end of August — a world record for drilling in one 100-day summer season.
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An editorial and letter, published simultaneously by the BMJ and Lancet, warn that failure to agree radical cuts in carbon dioxide emissions at the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen this December spells a global health catastrophe.
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In addition to global warming, carbon dioxide emissions cause another, less well-known but equally serious and worrying phenomenon: ocean acidification. Researchers in the Laboratoire d'Océanographie at Villefranche (LOV) (CNRS / UPMC) have just demonstrated that key marine organisms, such as deep-water corals and pteropods (shelled pelagic mollusks) will be profoundly affected by this phenomenon during the years to come.
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For polar bears and small island nations, the melting ice sheets of the far north are a matter of life and death, threatening fragile ecosystems and feeding rising sea levels.
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Murmansk and Arkhangelsk border guard services have been included in a newly established Arctic Group for the protection of Russia’s northern borders.
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A recently completed scientific mission mapping the ocean north of Greenland could help solidify Danish and Greenlandic territorial claims to the North Pole.
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Russia will launch a Proton-M carrier rocket on September 25 from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan to orbit three Glonass navigation satellites, Russia's Federal Space Agency Roscosmos said on Tuesday.
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The Nordic countries are to invest €14 million in climate projects in developing countries. The money, part of a larger pool of no less than €1 billion, will be channeled through the Nordic Development Fund (NDF). The NDF board approved the aid at a meeting earlier this week.
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The first complete map of the lakes beneath Antarctica's ice sheets reveals the continent's secret water network is far more dynamic than we thought. This could be acting as a powerful lubricant beneath glaciers, contributing to sea level rise.
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Canada exploration of the Arctic sea floor discovered an unusual underwater mountain and evidence that could boost the two countries' claims that their boundaries extend farther north. For the past two months ships from the countries have ventured north in icy areas of the Arctic where almost no surface ships have been, in an effort to find out how far the continental shelf extends.
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The link between declining CO2 levels in the earth's atmosphere and the formation of the Antarctic ice caps some 34 million years ago has been confirmed for the first time in a major research study.
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Fish in U.S. waters from Cape Hatteras to the Canadian border have moved away from their traditional, long-time habitats over the past four decades because of fundamental changes in the regional ecosystem, according to a new report by NOAA researchers.
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Oil and natural gas are luring the major powers to the Arctic. The new Great Game includes Russia, the US, Canada and other countries competing for natural resources around the North Pole. More information is available today than ever before about the location and abundance of the region's riches.
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For hundreds of years, mariners have dreamed of an Arctic shortcut that would allow them to speed trade between Asia and the West. Two German ships are poised to complete that transit for the first time, aided by the retreat of Arctic ice that scientists have linked to global warming.
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The speedy climate changes may be the reason for a doubling of wild reindeers on Svalbard in the past 30 years.
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Arctic and Antarctic research teams pulled back to warmer climates when the International Polar Year wrapped last March. But the call has gone out for a return to the poles for a more focused investigation into the effects of global warming. Leading the charge back to the Canadian Arctic is David Hik, a University of Alberta biology professor and a lead researcher with IPY.
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"The Arctic as we know it may soon be a thing of the past," says Eric Post, associate professor of biology at Penn State University. Post leads a large, international team that carried out ecosystem-wide studies of the biological response to Arctic warming during the fourth International Polar Year, which ended in 2008. The team's results will be reported on 11 September 2009 in the journal Science.
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Analysis of a rock type found only in the world's oldest oceans has shed new light on how large animals first got a foothold on Earth.
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Much of circumpolar Arctic research focuses on the physical, direct changes resulting from climate warming such as sea ice retreat and temperature increases. “What’s understudied is the living component of the Arctic and that includes humans,” said Syndonia “Donie” Bret-Harte, associate professor of biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and co-author of a paper to be published September 11, 2009 in the journal Science.
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Simultaneously as climate scientists can see a near record low sea ice in the Arctic, two German merchant vessels are the first ever to make it through the formerly impenetrable Northeast Passage.
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The Svalbard population of polar bears could be increasing, says World Wildlife Fund expert Dr Tom Arnbom.
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Lower demand has reduced coal production by 50 percent at the Norwegian Svalbard archipelago. The local coal company now intends to dismiss 25 percent of staff.
The small Arctic society at Svalbard might face troubled times following the economic problems of mining company Store Norske.
The Store Norske accounts for a key part of employment at the archipelago. The other main local source of employment is the quickly developing polar research.
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The two Russian energy majors Gazprom and Rosneft have agreed about possible joint exploration of the shelf.
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Our reason for being in Antarctica is to fly small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), known as Aerosondes, to make measurements of the atmosphere and ocean over the Terra Nova Bay polynya (an area of open water surrounded by sea ice). Today we took a major step towards that goal when we completed our first Aerosonde flight of the trip. This flight was a short test flight, which lasted just over 1 hour while the aircraft circled close to the runway.
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A new Russian manned drifting weather station started operating in the Arctic Ocean on Monday, a spokesman for the hydrometeorology service's Arctic and Antarctic research institute said.
The North Pole-37 (SP-37) station officially began work at 14:30 GMT, two hours after it had made its first weather report. The station has a crew of 16.
The previous station, which had a crew of 18 specialists, was established last September and travelled 1,200 km (746 miles) across the Arctic Ocean before being dismantled in late August.
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The Arctic is warmer than it's been in 2,000 years, even though it should be cooling because of changes in the Earth's orbit that cause the region to get less direct sunlight.
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Warming in the Arctic will likely have far-reaching impacts throughout the world, resulting in a sharp increase in harmful greenhouse gases and significant shifts in global weather patterns that could disrupt the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people.
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In September 1909, Dr. Frederick A. Cook and Robert E. Peary each returned from the Arctic with a tale of having reached the North Pole. Neither provided any solid proof or corroborating testimony; both told vague stories with large gaps. They couldn’t even convincingly explain how they had plotted their routes across the polar ice.
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A Canadian-Danish resolution on Hans Island could be 'a way of getting the ball rolling' on other northern ownership disputes
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For the fourth time in only five years, the Northeast Passage has opened, cutting 4,500 miles off the 12,500-mile trip from the European Atlantic to the Asian Pacific for shipping companies. Two German ships recently were able to make the first commercial voyage ever through the Northeast Passage without the assistance of icebreakers.
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After more than a decade of inquiry, a Princeton-led team of scientists has turned the tables on a long-standing controversy to re-establish an old truth about nitrogen mixing in the oceans.
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No result in the search for Norway’s missing explorer Roald Amundsen’s aircraft.
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Warming from greenhouse gases has trumped the Arctic's millennia-long natural cooling cycle, suggests new research. Although the Arctic has been receiving less energy from the summer sun for the past 8,000 years, Arctic summer temperatures began climbing in 1900 and accelerated after 1950.
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The Barents Euro-Arctic Council (BEAC) plays a key-role in how to adapt to changing living conditions caused by climate change, and BEAC should be used much more effectively for environmental work, said State Secretary Heidi Sørensen today at the opening of the Conference on Climate Change in the Barents Region.
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Norwegian foreign minister Jonas Gahr Store sees nothing problematic or fearful in the increased Russian military activity in the north. – There is no tension between the Norwegian and the Russian military. 15 years of Norwegian-Russian cooperation has removed all of this, says Store .
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For the ninth year running Bodo Graduate School of Business invited Russian students to learn about Business practice in Norway. This time the course was arranged in Kirkenes.
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UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon visited Svalbard to learn more about the effects of climate change in the Arctic. During a visit at the ice edge he expressed deep concern about the future of the Arctic.
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Details of research conducted by an international team of scientists using a remote operated vehicle (ROV) who filmed various kinds of jellyfish and other similar animals in the depths of the isolated Arctic Ocean back in 2005 have recently been published in the journal Deep Sea Research Part II.
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Content:
1. IPO Activities 2. IPY Reports
3. October Polar Week (Oct 5-9)
4. APECS update
5. Upcoming IPY meetings and AGU sessions
6. Update from Oslo 2010 Planning Process
7. Call for new stories and blogs for ipy.org
Report no. 29, September 2009
From: IPY International Programme Office
To: IPY Project Coordinators
cc: IPY Community Google Groups
pdf
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The world's seas could rise by more than a meter (3 feet) by 2100 as the melting Arctic has an impact on weather across the planet, the environmental group WWW said in a report on Wednesday.
That projection, roughly twice the sea-level rise cited in U.N. and other research, takes account of the impact of disappearing ice sheets of Greenland and western Antarctica.
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Currently, a Norwegian expedition is searching the sea floor between Bjørnøya and Northern Norway in the hope to find remains of Roald Amundsens plane Latham 47.
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A discovery about the moon made in the 1960s is helping researchers unlock secrets about Earth's oceans today.
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General Secretary of the United Nations Ban Ki-Moon yesterday took off from the Svalbard Archipelago towards the Arctic ice brim.
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The best place on Earth to observe the stars has been discovered in Antarctica. Appearing in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, a new study describes Ridge A, which lies about six hundred miles from the South Pole, as the most ideal place for astronomical observations. Although the area 13,297 feet (about 4 km) above sea level, it has never been explored, it was determined to be ideal for observations based on criteria such as cloud cover and atmospheric turbulence. Because of the darker sky, views seen from Ridge A can be up to three times sharper than those provided by the best sites anywhere else on earth.
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Lakes in Antarctica, concealed under miles of ice, require scientists to come up with creative ways to identify and analyze these hidden features. Now, researchers using space-based lasers on a NASA satellite have created the most comprehensive inventory of lakes that actively drain or fill under Antarctica's ice. They have revealed a continental plumbing system that is more dynamic than scientists thought.
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This summer, a group of scientists and students — as well as a Canadian senator, a writer, and a filmmaker — set out from Resolute Bay, Canada, on the icebreaker Louis S. St-Laurent. They were headed through the Northwest Passage, but instead of opening shipping lanes in the ice, they had gathered to open up new lines of thinking on Arctic science.
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Scientists of the Geesthacht GKSS Research Centre have developed a radar system with which it is possible to study the behaviour of sea waves. This technology will be used immediately on the North Sea on the FINO3 research platform in order to determine the interactions between offshore wind power machines and swells.
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The Russian Fisheries Committee has announced a tender for the projecting of a fish processing plant on Svalbard.
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Two years ago, Russian submarines planted a rustproof titanium flag on the seabed beneath the North Pole. Although a potentially provocative act, the majority of Russians heartily approved. On Soviet maps, the dotted line of the Russian frontier stretched from the country’s eastern and western borders to the North Pole and for generations Russians have considered this vast ice desert as part of their territory.
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An historic event could have been left unnoticed if it wasn’t for Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. The operational start of icebreaker St Petersburg has helped Russia increase its advantages in the fight for the Arctic’s hydrocarbon and raw mineral reserves. .
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