By Andrew Christ and Paul Bierman In 1963, inside a covert U.S. military base in northern Greenland, a team of scientists began drilling down through the Greenland ice sheet. Piece by piece, they extracted an ice core 4 inches across and nearly a mile long. At the very end, they pulled up something else – […]
By Jeff Masters, Ph.D. Earth had its second-warmest year on record in 2020, just 0.02 degrees Celsius (0.04°F) behind the record set in 2016, and 0.98 degrees Celsius (1.76°F) above the 20th-century average, NOAA reported January 14. NASA and the European Copernicus Climate Change Service rated 2020 as tied with 2016 as the warmest year […]
As the planet’s temperature warms, the frequency of lightning strikes is expected to grow with it, Environmental Journal reported. Currently, lightning strikes the earth’s surface nearly eight million times a day. This number is expected to dramatically increase as global temperatures rise, according to a study published by Science. The U.S., for example, could experience […]
By Andrea Germanos “The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge faces its biggest threat yet.” That’s the warning issued by the National Audubon Society on Tuesday — a day before the Trump administration is set to sell oil and gas leasing rights in the refuge’s coastal plain, a biodiversity hotspot of critical importance to the Gwich’in people […]
By Dana Drugmand Norway’s Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled not to overturn the Norwegian government’s approval of new licenses for offshore oil drilling in the fragile Arctic region. The ruling – a culmination of four years of high-profile litigation in a case challenging continued fossil fuel production on climate change grounds — came as a […]
In good news that has scientists excited, bowhead whale populations are nearing pre-commercial whaling numbers in U.S. waters. According to a recent National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) report card on the species, bowhead whales are the true Arctic baleen whale species and the only one that lives in the cold waters year-round. In the […]
The moon helps to control the release of methane from the Arctic Ocean. That’s the takeaway from a study published in Nature Communications in October, which found that the tidal rhythms played a role in the intensity and frequency of methane releases from sediments in the Arctic Ocean. Lower tides meant more intense releases, while […]
Global warming is rapidly changing the Arctic into a region that is, “warmer, less frozen, and biologically changed in ways that are scarcely imaginable even a generation ago,” according to NOAA’s annual Arctic report card, released Tuesday. That description, from Rick Thoman, a University of Alaska scientist and one of the editors of the assessment, […]
By Jessica Corbett Climate action advocates and wildlife defenders celebrated Monday after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit rejected the Trump administration’s approval of Liberty, a proposed offshore oil-drilling project in federal Arctic waters that opponents warned would endanger local communities, animals, and the environment. “This is a huge victory for polar […]