After ongoing pressure from environmental groups and Indigenous communities, Bank of America has said it will not finance any oil and gas exploration in the Arctic, making it the last major U.S. financial institution to do so. The decision is especially significant because outgoing President Donald Trump has opened up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge […]
The wildfires that ignited in the Arctic this year started earlier and emitted more carbon dioxide than ever before. Now, a group of researchers is warning that the nature of Arctic fires may be changing, and it’s important to understand how in order to better predict the future of the global climate. “It’s not just […]
A recent Science Magazine feature blamed an underwater heat blob for exacerbating sea ice loss as it proclaimed what many Arctic scientists already know: Arctic sea ice is racing toward its demise. Even without the blob, ice levels were already catastrophically low. “There can be little doubt that the vast majority of Earth’s ice loss […]
What is the environmental footprint of your favorite pair of blue jeans? A new study indicates it might be quite large. The study, published in Environmental Science and Technology Letters Wednesday, found denim microfibers had infiltrated all the way to the Canadian Arctic Ocean. Researchers say it’s a telling example of the extent of human-generated […]
Can the past predict the future? In the case of communities of microbes living in the Arctic permafrost, researchers at the University of Alberta think it might. The scientists discovered that the microbes and chemistry of Arctic soil changed dramatically following the end of the last Ice Age, and the same thing could happen again […]
The Earth has lost 28 trillion tonnes (approximately 31 trillion U.S. tons) of ice in just 23 years, and the climate crisis is largely to blame. The finding comes in a review paper published in The Cryosphere this month that used satellite data and numerical modelling to calculate all the ice that melted worldwide between […]
By Alex Kirby The temperature of the Arctic matters to the entire world: it helps to keep the global climate fairly cool. Scientists now say that by 2035 there could be an end to Arctic sea ice. The northern polar ocean’s sea ice is a crucial element in the Earth system: because it is highly […]
A 4,000-year-old ice shelf in the Canadian Arctic has collapsed into the sea, leaving Canada without any fully intact ice shelves, Reuters reported. The Milne Ice Shelf lost more than 40 percent of its area in just two days at the end of July, said researchers who monitored its collapse. Unlike glaciers, ice shelves are […]
Three years ago, scientists predicted it would happen. Now, new NASA satellite imagery confirms it’s true: two ice caps in Canada’s Nunavut province have disappeared completely, providing more visual evidence of the rapid warming happening near the poles, as CTV News in Canada reported. According to Gizmodo, scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data […]