In Norilsk, the northernmost city in the world, the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world, but the permafrost and structural problems have not been caused by climate change alone. A smelting company has polluted rivers and destroyed boreal forest. Norilsk, population 176,000, is known by environmentalists and the Russian […]
Ice sheets in Greenland are melting so rapidly due to high temperatures in the Arctic that the amount of ice melt from Tuesday was enough to cover all of Florida in two inches of water, according to the researchers at Polar Portal. https://twitter.com/WMO/statuses/1420665634518708229 Greenland has lost 18.4 billion tons of surface mass since last Sunday. […]
By Isabela Martel When British environmental geochemist Jon Hawkings arrived in Greenland for the first time in 2012, he was impressed. “It’s mind-blowing: You look onto the horizon and it’s just ice and it goes on for 150, 200 kilometers at least.” He went to the Arctic with a group of international scientists. Their goal […]
The Department of the Interior on Tuesday suspended oil and gas leases in Alaska‘s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge until a comprehensive analysis can determine the environmental impact of drilling in the area. A review “identified defects in the underlying record of decision supporting the leases, including the lack of analysis of a reasonable range of […]
By Kimberly M. S. Cartier As the Arctic continues to warm, climate changes cascade into the marine environment. Top predators like polar bears, beluga whales, and narwhals are affected by shifting seasonality and loss of the Arctic sea ice that shapes where they live and what they eat. Moreover, changes in ocean currents alter the […]
By Kenny Stancil Over the past five decades, the Arctic has warmed three times faster than the world as a whole, leading to rapid and widespread melting of ice and other far-reaching consequences that are important not only to local communities and ecosystems but to the fate of life on planet Earth. The Arctic Monitoring […]
By Kelly Trout For years, we’ve seen fossil fuel companies and governments justify their fossil fuel expansion plans – from the TransMountain tar sands pipeline expansion to Arctic oil drilling to the Adani coal mine – on the backs of scenarios from the International Energy Agency (IEA). This was possible because, until today, the world’s […]
Methane bubbles regularly reach the surface of the Laptev Sea in the East Siberian Arctic Ocean (ESAO), each of them a small blow to our efforts to mitigate climate change. The source of the methane used to be a mystery, but a joint Swedish-Russian-U.S. investigation recently discovered that an ancient gas reservoir is responsible for […]
By Stuart Braun The melting of the polar ice caps has often been portrayed as a tsunami-inducing Armageddon in popular culture. In the 2004 disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow, the warming Gulf Stream and North Atlantic currents cause rapid polar melting. The result is a massive wall of ocean water that swamps New York […]