arctic

“My leg was so badly broken, they thought I might lose it,” Finnish free diver Johanna Nordblad says in a soothing voice in the opening of a stunning short documentary from British director Ian Derry. After a terrible downhill biking accident in which Norblad nearly lost her leg to necrosis, she began a cold water […]

By Alex Kirby In an unusually stark warning, a leading international scientific body said the Arctic climate is changing so fast that researchers are struggling to keep up. The changes happening there, it said, are affecting the weather worldwide. As ice melts, the liquid water collects in depressions on the surface and deepens them, forming […]

By Tim Radford The world of the polar bear is shrinking—everywhere. New research by scientists in the U.S. confirms that each of the 19 known populations of Ursus maritimus is increasingly affected by the earlier sea ice melt in the Arctic spring, and the later arrival of ice every autumn. Polar bears are affected by […]

A team of Russian scientists on a remote Arctic island were rescued by a passing ship after being trapped for days inside their weather station by hungry polar bears. The Polar Bear Programme The scientists were staying on Troynoy Island located in the Kara Sea north of Siberia when, on Aug. 31, a polar bear […]

An 80-mile long crack in the Larsen C ice shelf threatens to dislodge a chunk of ice measuring about 2,300 square miles, nearly the size of Delaware and twice the size of the massive Larsen B ice shelf collapse in 2002. As the long Southern Hemisphere polar night is ending, satellites have been able to […]

The Arctic’s Baffin Bay and Davis Strait region is home to seals, bowhead whales, polar bears and up to 90 percent of the world’s narwhals. The area’s marine waters also provide habitat for 116 species of fish, such as Arctic char, an important dietary staple for Nunavut’s Inuit communities. Aboriginal groups in the Nunavut community […]

By David Thoreson Alaska and most of our country has been unusually hot this year—the hottest year on record for Fairbanks, Anchorage, and Juneau, Alaska, actually. The entire state has been about 10 degrees hotter than usual. Even for the fast-melting Arctic we have reached “uncharted territory.” During the past 25 years and 70,000 miles, […]

By Astrid Caldas There is just so much to digest in the latest release of monthly global temperature data by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), I thought I needed to say something. I just don’t know where to start, so bear with me, please, as […]