(Southwest Research Institute press release via Science Daily, 18 April 2013) -- A team of geoscientists from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) using newly available remote-sensing technology has achieved unprecedented detail in quantifying subtle, long-period changes in the water levels of shallow lakes and ponds in hard-to-reach Arctic wetlands.

Analysis comparing time-lapsed, high-resolution satellite imagery of the Ahnewetut Wetlands in Kobuk Valley National Park, Alaska, revealed an accelerated loss of surface water in shallow thaw lakes and ponds over a recent 27-year period compared to the preceding 27-year timespan. Those periods generally coincide with a well-known cooling and warming cycle known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, whose period is about five decades.

The analysis compared historical high-resolution aerial photography with more recent satellite imagery to quantify the evolution of 22 shallow lakes and surrounding permafrost in the park over 54 years between 1951 and 2005.

Tagged: News, Research

(Bjørnhild Fjeld/ScienceNordic, 8 April 2013) -- Modern forestry techniques are like plantations, with a homogenous blend of trees covering vast areas. Old and young trees rarely stand together. The quest for profit and efficiency has brought this about. But there are downsides - one being that the ecosystem becomes more vulnerable to changes. Monoculture forestry depletes forest fauna.

Tim Horstkotte of the University of Umeå’s Department of Ecology and Environmental Sciences has studied the interaction of reindeer husbandry and forestry in North Sweden. According to his study modern forestry makes it harder for reindeer to find food during extreme chills. Horstkotte asserts that a diversity in forest landscapes with a larger share of old growth and more variation in trees is indispensable to a viable reindeer husbandry sector.

“In contrast to monocultures, a mix of different species gives reindeer owners leeway for reacting to changes in winter grazing areas.” “They can alternative sites to find accessible forage for their reindeer when lichen availability is poor in certain types of forest,” says Horstkotte. Terrestrial lichen - growing low on the ground - tops the list of reindeer food through winter. So the researcher monitored snow conditions and studied how this affected access to forage in different types of forest.

This led to the discovery that young and old forest offer different kinds of grazing the animals. Horstkotte stresses that forests must be allowed to mature for a long time, so slow-growing arboreal lichens have a chance to get established. It serves as a supplemental forage for reindeer during winter, especially in periods with a hard snow crust on the ground, when it is hard for the animals to break through to terrestrial lichens.Horstkotte thinks that decisions regarding the exploitation of forests should give more attention to the social and cultural values of ecosystems.

Tagged: News, Polar research: Reports and findings

(Harvard University Press release via Science Daily, 13 April 2013) -- Harvard researchers are adding nuance to our understanding of how modern and historical temperatures compare. Through their statistical model of Arctic temperatures and how they relate to instrumental and proxy records, Martin Tingley, a research associate in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, and Peter Huybers, professor of earth and planetary sciences, have shown that the warmest summers in the last two decades were unprecedented in six centuries. The work is described in paper published in the April 11 issue of Nature. ...

Perhaps the most basic quantity is average Arctic temperature, and Tingley said that the summers of 2005, 2007, 2010, and 2011 were each warmer than all years prior to 2005 in at least 95 percent of the ensemble members. Furthermore, the rate of temperature increase observed over the last century is, with 99 percent probability, greater in magnitude than centennial trends in the last 600 years. At a regional level, the summer of 2010 featured the warmest year in western Russia, with 99 percent probability, and also featured the warmest year in western Greenland and the Canadian Arctic, with 90 percent probability.

Tagged: Arctic, News

(CBC News, 18 March 2013) -- A new arctic research facility opened in Winnipeg Monday — the same day a major late-season blizzard hit southern Manitoba. The Nellie Cournoyea Arctic Research Facility opened at the University of Manitoba, and adds 60,000 sq. ft. of space for researchers to work. David Barber is the research chair in arctic system science at the U of M and said the facility is one-of-a-kind in Canada.

“We have our own sea ice tank on the University of Manitoba campus where we can grow our own sea ice under controlled conditions,” said Barber. “We can test out different kinds of hypotheses about characteristics of the ice.” A grand opening event held Wednesday morning let the public get a glimpse inside the research that will go on at the facility.

“It has specialized cold rooms and specialized research labs that look at all kinds of aspects of the arctic system and how it’s functioning,” said Barber. The project was partly funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation. Foundation officials said the labs, classrooms and offices were needed to accommodate an influx of students and researchers who wanted to work with Dr. Soren Rysgaard. The centre was named after the first female premier of a Canadian territory.

Tagged: Arctic, News, Research infrastructure

(American Geophysical Union press release via Science Daily, 12 March 2013) -- Ongoing glacier loss in the Canadian high Arctic is accelerating and probably irreversible, new model projections by Lenaerts et al., suggest. The Canadian high Arctic is home to the largest clustering of glacier ice outside of Greenland and Antarctica -- 146,000 square kilometers (about 60,000 square miles) of glacier ice spread across 36,000 islands.

In the past few years, the mass of the glaciers in the Canadian Arctic archipelago has begun to plummet. Observations from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites suggest that from 2004 to 2011 the region's glaciers shed approximately 580 gigatons of ice. Aside from glacier calving, which plays only a small role in Canadian glacier mass loss, the drop is due largely to a shift in the surface-mass balance, with warming-induced meltwater runoff outpacing the accumulation of new snowfall. ...

The authors calculate that by 2100, when the Arctic archipelago is 6.5 Kelvin (14 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer, the rate of glacier mass loss will be roughly 144 gigatons per year, up from the present rate of 92 gigatons per year. In total, the researchers expect Canadian Arctic archipelago glaciers to lose around 18 percent of their mass by the end of the century. Given current warming trends, they suggest that the ongoing glacier loss is effectively irreversible.

Tagged: Arctic, News, Polar research: Reports and findings

(Kate Allen Science/Technology World, Toronto Star, 12 March 2013) -- In Germany, in New Zealand, in the Canary Islands and at 21 other observatories around the world, instruments called infrared spectrometers are teasing apart sunlight to measure greenhouse gas levels in the Earth’s atmosphere. Two dozen spectrometers make up the Total Carbon Column Observing Network (TCCON). The one in Eureka, Nunavut, is the most northerly of them all — a sentry in the Arctic, where extreme effects of climate change are rapidly altering the environment.

“They see our site at Eureka as being a key site,” says University of Toronto atmospheric physicist Kimberly Strong, who oversees the instrument. Last April, federal funding to Eureka lab dried up; the spectrometer dropped from 150 measurement days a year to around 30. The Arctic is a core part of this country’s identity, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper is eager to assert Canada’s sovereignty in the North. Last Thursday, the government signed a $288-million shipbuilding contract for new Arctic patrol vessels. Yet increasingly, the basic science that would let us understand changes occurring in our own backyard — and either mitigate or take advantage of them — is being neglected by Canada and assumed by other countries, Arctic researchers say.

“If we Canadians don’t do the work, it’s not like other people are just going accept that internationally,” says Antoni Lewkowicz, a permafrost scientist at the University of Ottawa. “You can only so often have maps presented at conferences of the circumpolar area and big blanks gaps over Canada before the people who are in Sweden or Germany say, ‘Oh, well I guess somebody better do that work, then.’”

Tagged: News, Polar research: Reports and findings

(PLoS press release via EurekAlert!, 6 March 2013) -- Analysis of DNA extracted from a fossil tooth recovered in southern Siberia confirms that the tooth belonged to one of the oldest known ancestors of the modern dog, and is described in research published March 6 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Anna Druzhkova from the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Russian Federation, and colleagues from other institutions.

Human domestication of dogs predates the beginning of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, but when modern dogs emerged as a species distinct from wolves is still unclear. Although some previous studies have suggested that this separation of domestic dogs and wolves occurred over 100,000 years ago, the oldest known fossils of modern dogs are only about 36,000 years old.

The new research published today evaluates the relationship of a 33,000 year old Siberian fossil to modern dogs and wolves based on DNA sequence. The researchers found that this fossil, named the 'Altai dog' after the mountains where it was recovered, is more closely related to modern dogs and prehistoric canids found on the American continents than it is to wolves. They add, "These results suggest a more ancient history of the dog outside the Middle East or East Asia, previously thought to be the centers where dogs originated." [doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0057754]

Tagged: News, Polar research: Reports and findings, Research

(Woods Hole Research Center press release via EurekAlert!, 10 March 2013) -- An international team of authors from 17 institutions in seven countries, including the Woods Hole Research Center, published a study in the journal Nature Climate Change on the 10 March 2013 (10.1038/NCLIMATE1836: http://www.nature.com/nclimate). The study shows that, as the cover of snow and ice in the northern latitudes has diminished in recent years, the temperature over the northern land mass has increased at different rates during the four seasons, causing a reduction in temperature and vegetation seasonality in this area. The temperature and vegetation at northern latitudes increasingly resemble those found several degrees of latitude farther south as recently as 30 years ago.

The NASA-funded study, based on newly improved ground and satellite data sets, examines critically the relationship between changes in temperature and vegetation productivity in northern latitudes. "The amplified warming in the circumpolar area roughly above the Canada-USA border is reducing temperature seasonality over time because the colder seasons are warming more rapidly than the summer," says Liang Xu, a Boston University doctoral student and lead co-author of the study. As a result of the enhanced warming over a longer ground-thaw season, the total amount of heat available for plant growth in these northern latitudes is increasing—creating large patches of vigorously productive vegetation totaling more than a third of the northern landscape—over 9 million km2, which is roughly about the area of the USA.

A key finding of this study is an accelerating greening rate in the Arctic and a decelerating rate in the boreal region, despite a nearly constant rate of temperature seasonality diminishment in these regions over the past 30 years. ... The authors measured seasonality changes using latitude as a yardstick. They first defined reference latitudinal profiles for the quantities being observed and then quantified changes in them over time as shifts along these profiles.

Tagged: News, Polar research: Reports and findings, Research

(Nunatsiaq News, 27 February 2013) -- The future Canadian High Arctic Research Station in Nunavut moved one step closer to reality, with the Feb. 27 announcement of where the facility will be built in Cambridge Bay — on the Plateau just outside town.

“This is another key milestone in the construction phase of the Canadian High Arctic Research Station,” said Bernard Valcourt, the new minister of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development, in a news release. “With the selection of the Plateau site as the location for CHARS, we are one step closer to building this major centre for scientific research and to building important partnerships across the North, Canada, and internationally.”

The Plateau site, one of five which was under consideration for the $142.5-million facility, is located on a slope overlooking the community and the bay, but close to the centre of the town. This site will form the main campus of CHARS, and it may include one or multiple buildings, with “excellent potential use for community integration,” the news release said. The main campus will also use existing and future community infrastructure and remote experimental sites.

Tagged: Arctic, News, Research infrastructure

(Hebrew University of Jerusalem via physorg.com, 18 February 2013) -- If you thought antifreeze was only something that was necessary to keep your car from freezing up in the winter, think again. Plants and animals living in cold climates have natural antifreeze proteins (AFPs) which prevent ice growth and crystallization of organic fluid matter. Without such antifreeze, living matter would suffer from frost damage and even death.

Production of such antifreeze proteins is one of the major evolutionary routes taken by a variety of organisms, including fish, insects, bacteria, plants and fungi. Understanding how this mechanism works is not only significant in itself, but also has important implications for improving the world's food and medicinal production, believe researchers from Israel, Canada and the US who investigated how the process works.

Working on unraveling the AFP enigma were scientists from the lab of Dr. Ido Braslavsky of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and from Ohio University in the US, in collaboration with Prof. Peter L. Davies from Queens University (Ontario, Canada) and Prof. Alex Groisman from the University of California (San Diego, CA), with the support of the National Science Foundation, the Israel Science Foundation, the European Research Council, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

Despite half a century of research, the mechanism underlying the activity of the natural antifreeze proteins is still unclear. One of the debates in the academic community regards the chemistry and physics behind the interactions of antifreeze proteins and ice. In particular, there is an ongoing argument over whether the binding of the proteins to ice is reversible and whether continued presence of these proteins in solution is necessary for prevention of ice growth.

Tagged: News

(Paul Hamaker/Examiner.com, 20 February 2013) -- In a ten year study unlike any previous analysis, Eric Post, a Penn State University professor of biology, has determined that the best hope for Arctic plant diversity to survive the ongoing increases in temperature are large herbivores. The research was published in the Feb. 20, 2013, issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London.

Unlike previous climate studies, Post included the contribution of large herbivores like caribou and musk ox to the mix of factors that may determine if plant diversity can persist in the Arctic in the ages of global warming that promise as much as a three degree Celsius increase in Arctic temperature. In a uniquely designed experiment, Post simulated global warming in a small low-Arctic plant community near Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, with and without the contribution of herbivores.

Post determined that herbivore grazing acts as a buffer against the effects of climate change on plant species diversity. Ungrazed shrubs produce a physical cover and leaf litter than prevents smaller species of plants from receiving proper nutrition and sunlight. Animal grazing eliminated the problem and maintained plant diversity. This work is the first long term study to include the animal contribution to the problem of global warming and climate change in the Arctic.

Tagged: Arctic, News, Research

(Brendan P. Kelly and Simon N. Stephenson/ US Office of Science and Technology Policy press release, 19 February 2013) -- Today, the Administration’s National Science and Technology Council released a five-year Arctic Research Plan that outlines key areas of study the Federal government will undertake to better understand and predict environmental changes in the Arctic. The Plan was developed by a team of experts representing 14 Federal agencies, based on input from collaborators including the Alaska Governor’s Office, indigenous Arctic communities, local organizations, and universities. Seven research areas are highlighted in the Plan as both important to the development of national policies and well-poised to benefit from interagency collaboration, including among them: regional climate models, human health studies, and adaptation tools for communities. ...

Among a number of other activities, the new five-year plan calls for the Department of Agriculture, Department of the Interior, Department of State, Environmental Protection Agency, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Science Foundation, and the Smithsonian Institution to work together to assess the resilience and vulnerabilities of Arctic communities to the impacts of climate change. That assessment will aim to provide Arctic residents, community leaders, and policy makers at all levels of government with the knowledge needed to plan and adapt.

The research plan released today does not encompass all Federal Arctic research activities that will occur over the next five years. It does, however, provide a roadmap for unprecedented collaboration between agencies on high impact research activities that will provide a solid scientific basis for on-the-ground progress in the Arctic. It also complements a number of steps being taken by the Administration to enable data-driven and science-based stewardship in the Arctic region, including the recent launch of regionally-focused data communities on ocean.data.gov.

To read the full report, please click here.

Tagged: Arctic, News, Research infrastructure

(Sybille Hildebrandt/ScienceNordic, 19 February 2013) -- Global warming causes the sea ice to shrink, and the melting plays a much greater part in the ability of continents and oceans to absorb and release greenhouse gases than previously thought. So concludes a Nordic research group after having reviewed the relevant scientific literature.

”The key message from science is that the current disappearance of the sea ice will play a major part in the exchange of greenhouse gases in the Arctic region. The melting not only affects the sea’s ability to absorb and release greenhouse gases – it also plays a surprisingly great part in this exchange on land,” says Lise Lotte Sørensen, a senior researcher at Aarhus University’s Arctic Research Centre.

Sørensen and her colleagues have spent years on studying the exchange of greenhouse gases between the atmosphere, the sea ice and the sea beneath. In recent years, they have also taken an interest in what research groups focusing on the land areas have found. This curiosity prompted them to review the scientific literature to see to the extent of the interplay between these areas. ...

Although not much is known about the interaction between land and sea, scientists are starting to understand which mechanisms control the processes at sea. By studying sea ice in the wild and in an ice tank at the University of Manitoba in Canada, Sørensen and her colleagues found that there is an exchange of greenhouse gases between land and the atmosphere even when there is sea ice. When the ice temperature exceeds minus five degrees Celsius, channels start to emerge in the ice. These channels act as a link between the sea and the atmosphere.

The heated ice is not as passive as previously thought. It houses a great deal of chemical processes that cause the ice to release its own greenhouse gas contents, which then rain down into the sea. This transport of greenhouse gases may potentially have a great impact on the climate. “We now need to focus on this increased importance of the sea ice, and we need to carry out more studies of sea ice. Nobody has so far been aware that the sea ice has such a great impact on the climate and the exchange of greenhouse gases in the entire Arctic region,” says the researcher.

Tagged: News, Polar research: Reports and findings

(Aarhus University , 1 February 2013) -- Climate change is one of the major challenges facing the international community in the coming century. The warmer climate has already had a significant impact on the distribution of the sea ice, and has led to the advancement of spring in the Arctic. There is a close connection between the Arctic climate and our own. The cold we are experiencing in Denmark at present is due to the polar front extending south, for example.

Researchers now have an unprecedented opportunity to study these climate changes at first hand, thanks to a grant of DKK 70.5 million from the Villum Foundation as part of its research infrastructure programme. The grant will be used to set up modern research facilities at Station North in the far north of Greenland. For a number of years, Aarhus University has been following the development of air pollution here from a small hut. This building will now be significantly upgraded, and Project Manager Henrik Skov is very pleased with the grant.

"It makes it possible to take top modern measurements and increase our presence at Station North. Our scientists will be able to carry out research that was previously impossible in the High Arctic," he says. "This way, we'll be able to extend our studies so that we not just follow air pollution, but also get to follow developments and understand the processes that exist between climate, pollution and the vulnerable ecosystems in the High Arctic. We're therefore certain that colleagues from Denmark and abroad will also be champing at the bit to join us in this work," he concludes.

Tagged: News, Research infrastructure

(CBC News, 13 February 2013) -- Ocean researchers are working to find out what goes on underneath the thick layers of Arctic sea ice during the winter. Little is known about frigid Arctic waters during winter months. For 10 days in -40 C temperatures, the Canadian Rangers Ocean Watch program will be testing the waters and studying how river water flow feeds in the high Arctic ecosystem. It's a joint effort between the Departments of National Defence, Fisheries and Oceans, the Vancouver Aquarium and the Canadian High Arctic Research Station.

“We'll build a picture of the wintertime ocean for the first time,” said oceanographer Bill Williams. ... The Canadian Rangers are along for the training. The hope is that they can monitor water flow during the winter months. “We hope to set up a long term monitoring project in which local people, in this case the rangers, can do sustained environmental monitoring of their own,” Williams said. Eric Solomon, from the Vancouver Aquarium, hopes to learn from local experts.

“The reality is there's nobody that understands the Arctic better than the people here in the North and by combining that knowledge with the scientific understanding and finding ways to connect those we can together have a much better understanding.” Williams says the Department of National Defence is involved because the science of understanding the waters in Canada could strengthen sovereignty claims. The researchers will be in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut before heading out to Hat Island near the Queen Maude Gulf.

Tagged: News, Research