(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

(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

(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

(National Science Foundation via Epoch Times, 17 December 2012) -- A team of scientists supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) has identified for the first time a clear 1,500-year cycle in the far North’s surface atmosphere pressure pattern. Called the Arctic Oscillation (AO), the cycle greatly influences weather in the Northern Hemisphere. The findings were published 11 November 2012 on Nature Geoscience’s website. Darby coauthored the paper with a team of scientists from Old Dominion and Kent State universities and the University of Southern California (USC). Coauthors are Joseph Ortiz, a geological oceanographer from Kent State; Chester Grosch, a physical oceanographer and computer scientist from ODU and Steven Lund, a geophysicist from USC.

William Wiseman, a program director in the Arctic Natural Sciences Program in NSF’s Office of Polar Programs, said the new research is innovative in its approach to separating human influences on climate from naturally occurring events. ... Working from a 20-meter-long sediment core raised offshore of Alaska from waters 1,300 meters deep, the researchers could detect varying amounts of iron-rich sand grains ice-rafted from Russia over the last 8,000 years. The core was originally recovered from the flank of Barrow Canyon by an NSF-funded oceanographic cruise....

Darby said that time-series analysis of the researchers’ geochemical record reveals a 1,500-year cycle that is similar to what other researchers have proposed in recent decades, based on scattered findings in paleoclimate records. But he and his colleagues are the first to find a high-resolution indicator of the Arctic record that resolves multidecadal-through-millennial-scale AO cycles, he said.

“Our record is the longest record to date to reconstruct the AO and documents that there is millennial scale variability in the AO,” Ortiz said. “The sedimentation rate at our site is also sufficient to statistically differentiate between a 1,000-year cycle and a 1,500-year cycle, which helps us to understand the dynamics of the response of the climate system to external forcing during the Holocene geological period.”

The 1,500-year cycle is distinct from a 1,000-year cycle found in a similarly analyzed record of total solar irradiance, the authors write, suggesting that the longer cycle arises from either internal oscillation of the climate system or as an indirect response to low-latitude solar forcing.

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

(Discovery News via Alaska Dispatch, 5 January 2013) -- Above the Arctic Circle, and below 700 feet of ice, scientists are working in the world’s only laboratory that is situated underneath a glacier, at the Svartisen glacier in northern Norway. These researchers are gathering some of the best glacial data that has ever been compiled, Discovery News reports. The lab is run by the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate, and researchers are carrying out experiments on glacier movement and drainage, as well as how the melt water impacts rising sea levels. While the first tunnel was initially created for a hydropower company, researchers were able to convince them to dig another small tunnel for research. They have since created additional tunnels for the lab, too.

The tunnels are created in a unique way: Instead of drilling a borehole through the ice to access the base of the glacier, researchers melt 30 – 40 foot long tunnels using hot water. It's a process that is far easier to coordinate, and researchers aren't hindered by the cracks in the ice drilling causes. Also with the new lab, they have easier access to the glacier and are able to take measurements from the same location with every visit. Creating one tunnel takes between 24 to 48 hours. Miriam Jackson, a senior research scientist and glaciologist with the directorate, remarked on the "beauty" of the process to Discovery News.

Tagged: Arctic, News, Research infrastructure

(Science Codex, 4 January 2013) -- What does pulling a radar-equipped sled across the Arctic tundra have to do with improving our understanding of climate change? It's part of a new way to explore the little-known world of permafrost soils, which store almost as much carbon as the rest of the world's soils and about twice as much as is in the atmosphere.

The new approach combines several remote-sensing tools to study the Arctic landscape—above and below ground—in high resolution and over large spatial scales. It was developed by a group of researchers that includes scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). They use ground-penetrating radar, electrical resistance tomography, electromagnetic data, and LiDAR airborne measurements. Together, these tools allow the scientists to see the different layers of the terrestrial ecosystem, including the surface topography, the active layer that seasonally freezes and thaws, and the deeper permafrost layer.

The goal is to help scientists determine what will happen to permafrost-trapped carbon as the climate changes. Will it stay put? Or will it enter the atmosphere and accelerate climate change? The scientists report their approach in a paper recently published online in the journal Hydrogeology. Their research is one of the first papers published in association with a new Department of Energy project called the Next-Generation Ecosystem Experiment (NGEE-Arctic), which seeks to gain a predictive understanding of the Arctic terrestrial ecosystem's feedback to climate. The NGEE-Arctic project is a collaboration among scientists and engineers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Berkeley Lab, and the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Tagged: Arctic, News, Research, Research infrastructure

(Unni Eikeseth, Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation via ScienceNordic, 20 December 2012) -- High levels of environmental contaminants are linked with thinner eggshells in the ivory gull, a red-listed high Arctic seabird. Scientists are concerned that pollutants and the stress from global warming could cause populations to plummet. The ivory gull (Pagophila eburnea) is a high Arctic seabird that lives year-round in an icy habitat. There are only about 8,000 -11,500 breeding pairs, and populations of this red-listed species have declined significantly in the last 20 years.

Norwegian and Russian scientists have found that the gull’s eggs are now 17 percent thinner than in samples collected before 1930, according to the December issue of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)’s magazine, Gemini. The researchers' findings have recently been published in the academic journal Science of the Total Environment. The ivory gull studies were conducted by the Norwegian Polar Institute in collaboration with NTNU and Russian research groups.

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

(Oregon State University press release via Phys.org, 3 January 2013) -- Marine resource managers often gauge the health of species based on overall biomass, but a new study of predator-prey relationships in the Bering Sea found that it isn't the total number of individuals that predators care about – it's how densely they are aggregated.

It's more than searching for an easy meal, the researchers say. Predators need to balance how much energy they expend in searching for food with the caloric and nutrient value of that which they consume. When prey doesn't aggregate, however, the search for food becomes much more difficult – affecting the health of the predators' offspring and the vitality of their overall population. Results of the study were published this week in the journal PLOS ONE. The study was part of the Bering Sea Integrated Ecosystem Research Project, which was funded by the North Pacific Research Board and the National Science Foundation.

"We had to think very differently about these interactions, trying to see the world from the predators' point of view," said Kelly Benoit-Bird, an Oregon State University marine ecologist and lead author on the study. "When we first tried to identify good foraging locations for predator species we looked at areas of high prey numbers because it makes sense that they'd be where the food is. But the results didn't match what we might have expected.

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

(Atle Staalesen/Barents Observer, 6 December 2012) -- After many years of expeditions with drifting North Pole stations, vanishing ice forces Russian Arctic researchers to go for unmanned solutions. Talking at an international polar conference in Sankt Petersburg on Wednesday, Head of the Russian Arctic and Antarctic Institute Ivan Frolov confirmed that Russia will conduct no more missions with drifting Arctic research stations.

Frolov instead proposes to base a series of drifting research buoys in the region. He also suggests to build a specially designed platform which can drift with the Arctic current, RIA Novosti reports. Since 1937, a total of 40 missions have been conducted with well-manned North Pole drifting stations. The ongoing 40th mission will be the last. As previously reported, the researchers had major problems with finding a suitable ice floes for the ongoing North Pole-40 mission.

The drifting North Pole stations, which have been organized by the Arctic and Antarctic Institute, have given major contributions to Russian research on the Arctic. In average, 15 people have manned the stations, which have included both housing and research facilities. Normally, the stations have been established in April and subsequently operated for up to three years when the ice floes end up in the Greenland straits. This year, however, the researchers were forced to end the previous North Pole-39 mission in the Canadian part of the Arctic following vanishing ice.

Tagged: Arctic, News, Research infrastructure

(Crystal Gammon/OurAmazingPlanet, NBC News, 19 December 2012) -- Walruses are sort of the Goldilocks of the North Pole — the chunks of sea ice they call home must be just right. If the ice floe is too large, the walrus can't get to water quickly enough to escape a polar bear attack; too small, and the ice can't support their weight and the walruses go splashing into the sea. Now, a new technique for mapping the 3-D structure of Arctic ice promises to help researchers better understand the habitat needs of walruses and other wildlife. The 3-D ice maps could also aid in planning shipping routes, research cruises and other Arctic endeavors, said Chandra Kambhamettu, a computer scientist at the University of Delaware who developed the technique.

"We're interested in objectively characterizing these habitats and how they're changing over time, as well as how to measure the effects of warming on the region," Kambhamettu told OurAmazingPlanet. Kambhamettu's team used the system, which relies on two cameras mounted to a research vessel, on a recent two-month cruise that traversed nearly 10,400 miles (17,000 km) of the Arctic Ocean. The 5-megapixel single lens reflex cameras, which are mounted to the ship side-by-side, 2 meters (6.6 feet) apart, capture a new high-resolution image each second. Because the cameras work in stereo — capturing simultaneous images from opposing angles, like our own eyes — Kambhamettu's team can resolve the depth of the ice from the images....

To be sure, his team isn't the first to use stereo photography to reconstruct a landscape in 3-D. But his team's recent Arctic expedition seems to be the first instance of researchers using stereo photography to measure 3-D changes in ice cover over time, Kambhamettu said. The technique produces maps with greater detail than radar or satellite images, and it's about one-tenth the cost of LiDAR (light detection and ranging), a type of laser radar that produces comparable data. A database with ice-depth maps and habitat data collected during the recent expedition should be up and running — and open to other researchers — by summer 2013, Kambhamettu said. (See also a gallery of walruses in "Giants on Ice" from LiveScience.

Tagged: Arctic, News, Research

(ArcticNet press release via Yahoo! Finance, 20 November 2012) -- VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA - Leading Arctic scientists, researchers, policy makers, NGOs, and northern stakeholders will meet in Vancouver [in December] to discuss climate change, food security, Inuit education, sovereignty and other pressing issues facing the Canadian Arctic.

"The Arctic is changing rapidly," said Louis Fortier, ArcticNet's scientific director. "Arctic ice is melting at record rates, new shipping routes are opening up and industries are showing keen interests in potential opportunities in the area. With Canada on the eve of taking over the chairmanship of the Arctic Council, this year's meeting will address some of the major challenges and opportunities brought by climate change and modernization in the Arctic."

More than 450 people are expected to attend what is the country's largest annual Arctic research gathering. This year's event will also host the first award ceremony of the $1 million annual Arctic Inspiration Prize, donated by the Vancouver couple of Sima Sharifi and Arnold Witzig of the S. and A. Inspiration Foundation. The prize will be awarded annually to teams that have presented a viable plan to turn Arctic knowledge into action.

Tagged: Arctic, News, Public events and conferences, Research infrastructure

(Jane George/Nunatsiaq News, 7 May 2012) -- At a time when many northerners say they’re tired of being researched by people from the South, a program has worked on developing home-grown northern researchers and policy-makers. Over the past two years, the Jane Glassco Arctic Fellowship Program, has helped about a dozen young northerners, aged 25 to 35, undertake and complete their own research projects.

“The program shows we have our own people in our own communities who can do research,” said the Jane Glassco Arctic Fellowship Program director (and former Nunavut MP) Nancy Karetak-Lindell, in a recent interview. The program, offered through the Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation with support from the J.M. Kaplan Fund, provided 14 northerners with two-year fellowships of $25,000. Fellowship applicants, who were not required to be university students or graduates, suggested their own projects.

“We didn’t want to tell them the areas that they wanted to work in,” Karetak-Lindell said. “I wanted to be surprised. I wanted them to tell us what they wanted to work on.”

The legacy of the fellowships will be the fellows’ ability “to create positive changes together for our people.” At the end of the IPY conference, Karetak-Lindell, in her closing remarks, also issued a challenge to the indigenous community: “to define priority areas we want to research, recruit our own people to conduct research, support our young people to pursue further education to become scientists, record our knowledge and use it to make our own people healthier, more self-sufficient and be recognized again as the rightful stewards of our land, animals and the environment.” The Jane Glassco fellows are a step in that direction, she said, so that “we, the people, have to matter. We want to be more important to researchers, our country and the world than the polar bear and the seal.” But to do that, “the onus is on us to be the future, to study the Arctic, and more sure this takes place,” Karetak-Lindell said in an interview.

Tagged: Arctic, News, Research

(NASA press release, 22 April 2012) -- The fragile and rapidly changing Arctic region is home to large reservoirs of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. As Earth's climate warms, the methane, frozen in reservoirs stored in Arctic tundra soils or marine sediments, is vulnerable to being released into the atmosphere, where it can add to global warming. Now a multi-institutional study by Eric Kort of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., has uncovered a surprising and potentially important new source of Arctic methane: the ocean itself.

Kort, a JPL postdoctoral scholar affiliated with the Keck Institute of Space Studies at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, led the analysis while he was a student at Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. The study was conducted as part of the HIAPER Pole-to-Pole Observations (HIPPO) airborne campaign, which flew a specially instrumented National Science Foundation (NSF)/National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Gulfstream V aircraft over the Pacific Ocean from nearly pole to pole, collecting atmospheric measurements from Earth's surface to an altitude of 8.7 miles (14 kilometers). The campaign, primarily funded by NSF with additional funding from NCAR, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, was designed to improve our understanding of where greenhouse gases are originating and being stored in the Earth system.

During five HIPPO flights over the Arctic from 2009 to 2010, Kort's team observed increased methane levels while flying at low altitudes over the remote Arctic Ocean, north of the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas. The methane level was about one-half percent larger than normal background levels. But where was the methane coming from? The team detected no carbon monoxide in the atmosphere that would point to possible contributions from human combustion activities. In addition, based on the time of year, location and nature of the emissions, it was extremely unlikely the methane was coming from high-latitude wetlands or geologic reservoirs. By comparing locations of the enhanced methane levels with airborne measurements of carbon monoxide, water vapor and ozone, they pinpointed a source: the ocean surface, through cracks in Arctic sea ice and areas of partial sea ice cover. The cracks expose open Arctic seawater, allowing the ocean to interact with the air, and methane in the surface waters to escape into the atmosphere. The team detected no enhanced methane levels when flying over areas of solid ice.

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

(NSF press release, 4 May 2012) -- Changes in the speed that ice travels in more than 200 outlet glaciers indicates that Greenland's contribution to rising sea level in the 21st century could be significantly less than the upper limits some scientists thought possible. The finding comes from a paper funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and NASA and published in today's journal Science. While the study indicates that a melting Greenland's contributions to rising sea levels could be less than expected, researchers concede that more work needs to be done before any definitive trend can be identified. Studies like this one are designed to examine more closely and in greater detail what is actually happening with the ice sheets, often using newer and more precise tools and thereby better defining the parameters that scientists use to make predictions, such as the upper limits of sea-level rise.

"This study provides more evidence that the rate at which these glaciers can dump ice into the ocean is indeed limited," said Ian Howat, assistant professor of Earth sciences and member of the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University, a co-author on the paper. "What remains to be seen is how long the acceleration will continue--but it appears that our worst-case scenarios aren't likely." The fate of the Earth's ice sheets and their potential contributions to sea-level rise as the globe warms are among the major scientific uncertainties cited in the Fourth Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This is in part because the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have historically been, and in large measure continue to be, relatively sparsely monitored, as compared to other parts of the globe. The faster the glaciers move, the more ice and melt water they release into the ocean. ...

"This study is a great example of the power of high-resolution data sets in both space and time, and the importance of looking carefully at as much data as possible in helping make the best predictions we can of future changes", said Henrietta Edmonds, program director for Arctic Natural Sciences in NSF's Office of Polar Programs. The scientists saw no clear indication in the new research that the glaciers will stop gaining speed during the rest of the century, and so by 2100 they could reach or exceed the scenario in which they contribute four inches to sea level rise.

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

(Hannah Heimbuch/Dutch Harbor Fisherman, 13 April 2012) -- The fifth and largest ever Western Alaska Interdisciplinary Science Conference descended on Dillingham last month, bringing a host of experts and members of the curious public together to discuss Alaska's most pressing science issues.

"Energy efficiency, renewable energy, and food security were reoccurring themes at the conference," said Chet Chambers, who led a session on Sustainable Energy Programs and Projects at UAF Bristol Bay Campus. "We were very lucky to have Rich Seifert as our keynote speaker and as a presenter in a breakout session," Chambers said. Seifert is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and an expert on renewable energy and homebuilding in cold climates. "The Green Building session was jam packed, standing room only and featured several big names in energy efficient construction/green building." Those names included Seifert, as well as Tom Marsik and Lyle Axelarris. "All (of them) spoke about innovative residential projects in Alaska that focus on minimizing fossil fuel usage," Chambers said.

University of Washington Fisheries Professor and WAISC presenter Daniel Schindler called this year's conference the best he's been to in a long time. "The wide diversity of topics, ranging from the biology of whales, to links between climate change and human health, to insights from traditional ecological knowledge, was truly remarkable," Schindler said. "Equally impressive was the composition of the speakers and audience. It is rare to see such broad cross-section of people at a science conference. High school students, resource managers, politicians, academics, and Joe Public were all there — and engaged in question and answer." That diversity meets one of Dr. Todd Radenbaugh's primary goals for this year's conference. Radenbaugh is one of the event's main organizers, and a professor at UAF's Bristol Bay Campus.

When it was started five years ago, the conference filled a need for a forum in which to let different disciplines and approaches to science co-mingle, Radenbaugh said. It allows people who normally wouldn't talk to each other to communicate on important topics. Not just in the formality of presentation and question-answer periods, but in the informal free time surrounding the event.

Tagged: Arctic, News, Public events and conferences

(University of Cape Town, Museum of Nature and Temple University press release, 11 April 2012) -- Duck-billed dinosaurs that lived within Arctic latitudes approximately 70 million years ago likely endured long, dark polar winters instead of migrating to more southern latitudes, a recent study by researchers from the University of Cape Town, Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas and Temple University has found.

The researchers published their findings, "Hadrosaurs Were Perennial Polar Residents," in the April issue of the journal The Anatomical Record: Advances in Integrative Anatomy and Evolutionary Biology. Anthony Fiorillo, a paleontologist at the Museum of Nature and Science, excavated Cretaceous Period fossils along Alaska's North Slope. Most of the bones belonged to Edmontosaurus, a duck-billed herbivore, but some others such as the horned dinosaur Pachyrhinosaurus were also found.

Fiorillo hypothesized that the microscopic structures of the dinosaurs' bones could show how they lived in polar regions. He enlisted the help of Allison Tumarkin-Deratzian, an assistant professor of earth and environmental science, who had both expertise and the facilities to create and analyze thin layers of the dinosaurs' bone microstructure. Another researcher, Anusuya Chinsamy-Turan, a professor of zoology at the University of Cape Town, was independently pursuing the same analysis of Alaskan Edmontosaurus fossils. ...

What the researchers found was bands of fast growth and slower growth that seemed to indicate a pattern. "What we found was that periodically, throughout their life, these dinosaurs were switching how fast they were growing," said Tumarkin-Deratzian. "We interpreted this as potentially a seasonal pattern because we know in modern animals these types of shifts can be induced by changes in nutrition. But that shift is often driven by changes in seasonality."

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

(Mark Johnson/newsnet5.com, 8 April 2012) -- CLEVELAND - Residents in the far northern territory of Nunavut in Canada have always disputed the scientific claims that the polar bear population in the cold, arctic region was in a death spiral. Back in 2004, American and Canadian scientists claimed that the polar bear numbers had dropped a whopping 22 percent and would continue to decline over the coming years. So what did the government of this small Canadian Territory near Hudson Bay do? They counted the bears themselves. The results have seriously challenged the doomsday predictions that polar bear populations in the Arctic are in rapid decline due to global warming, climate change and climate disruption. The numbers don't lie.

The aerial survey, completed in 2010, counted 1,013 Polar Bears along the Western Shore of Hudson Bay. Why is this number significant? That's a full 66 percent higher than estimates by scientists. Nunavut Government officials said that number could be even higher. Researchers, on the other hand, have been forecasting a steady decline in bear numbers in this critical region. They predicted a population in this area of 610 bears, due to warming temperatures and melting arctic sea ice. Melting ice would, scientists claim, hurt a bear's ability to find food and cause many to die. The Nunavut region is considered particularly important. Polar Bear numbers in the Hudson Bay region are considered a good guide to other bear colonies in the Arctic region.

According to the survey results , "Polar Bear population assessment in North America has historically relied on physical mark-recapture. These studies are logistically and financially intensive, and while widely accepted in the scientific community, local Inuit have voiced opposition to wildlife handling. To better reflect Inuit values and provide a rapid tool for monitoring Polar Bear population size, we developed and implemented an aerial survey in the Foxe Basin subpopulation (FB) during late summer, 2009 and 2010." The study shows that “the bear population is not in crisis as people believed,” said Drikus Gissing, Nunavut’s director of wildlife management. “There is no doom and gloom.” Since the survey was sponsored by the Nunavut government, it only covered the coastal areas in that territory, and did not cover the coastal areas in NW Quebec. So the numbers could be even higher.

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

(ESA press release via SpaceDaily, 5 April 2012) -- Marking another remarkable collaborative effort, ESA and NASA met up over the Arctic Ocean this week to perform some carefully coordinated flights directly under CryoSat orbiting above. The data gathered help ensure the accuracy of ESA's ice mission. The aim of this large-scale campaign was to record sea-ice thickness and conditions of the ice exactly along the line traced by ESA's CryoSat satellite orbiting high above. A range of sensors installed on the different aircraft was used to gather complementary information.

In orbit for two years, CryoSat carries the first radar altimeter of its kind to monitor changes in the thickness of ice. These airborne instruments included simple cameras to get a visual record of the sea ice, laser scanners to clearly map the height of the ice, an ice-thickness sensor called EM-Bird along with ESA's sophisticated radar altimeter called ASIRAS and NASA's snow and Ku-band radars, which mimic CryoSat's measurements but at a higher resolution.

As with any Earth observation mission, it is important to validate the readings acquired from space. This involves comparing the satellite data with measurements taken in situ, usually on the ground and from the air. The teams of scientists from Europe, US and Canada expect that by pooling flight time and the results they will get a much-improved accuracy of global ice-thickness trends measured by CryoSat and NASA's IceSat. This will, in turn, lead to a better understanding of the impact of climate change on the Arctic environment.

Tagged: Arctic, News, Research

(AGU press release via Physorg.com, 31 March 2012) -- Arctic sea ice has been declining over the past several decades as global climate has warmed. In fact, sea ice has declined more quickly than many models predicted, indicating that climate models may not be correctly representing some processes controlling sea ice.

One source of uncertainty in models is feedback from cloud cover. Sea ice can affect cloud cover, as melting sea ice and increased evaporation from the ocean surface can lead to more cloud formation. In the Arctic, clouds have an overall warming effect on the surface, so greater cloudiness in this region could lead to even more sea-ice melt.

Liu et al., analyzed satellite observations of cloud cover and sea ice from 2000 to 2010 to evaluate feedbacks between sea ice and cloud cover. They find that a 1 percent decrease in sea ice concentration leads to a 0.36-0.47 percent increase in cloud cover, and that 22-34 percent of variance in cloud cover can be explained by changes in sea ice. So as sea ice declines, the researchers predict that the Arctic will become cloudier.

More information: A cloudier Arctic expected with diminishing sea ice, Geophysical Research Letters, doi:10.1029/2012GL051251 , 2012

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

(CBC News, 30 March 2012) -- A three million-year-old skull found in the southern United States has traits of both beluga whales and narwhals, according to researchers. Nick Pyenson, curator of fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian Institution, said the ancient ancestor of the two Arctic whale species appears to have once preferred warmer climates, as the fossils are found in temperate latitudes. Pyenson says it shows that Arctic species may have evolved some traits for reasons other than breaking through ice and snow. He also has some ideas about why the species went North.

“If your food moved north, you'd probably move north, too,” he said. “That is one possible suggestion as to why they evolved in Arctic and Subarctic ecosystems, is that they were following prey resources further north.” The skull was found in a mining pit in 1969 in Virginia but was only analyzed recently. The research appears in this month’s issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

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

(Fred Pearce/New Scientist, 27 March 2012) -- The disappearance of Arctic sea ice has crossed a "tipping point" that could soon make ice-free summers a regular feature across most of the Arctic Ocean, says a British climate scientist who is setting up an early warning system for dangerous climate tipping points.

Tim Lenton at the University of Exeter has carried out a day-by-day assessment of Arctic ice-cover data collected since satellite observation began in 1979. He presented his hotly anticipated findings for the first time at the Planet Under Pressure conference in London on Monday.

Up until 2007, sea ice systematically fluctuated between extensive cover in winter and lower cover in summer. But since then, says Lenton, the difference between winter and summer ice cover has been a million square kilometres greater than it was before, as a result of unprecedented summer melting. These observations are in contrast to what models predict should have happened.

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

(CBC News, 16 March 2012) -- Canadians have donated about $10,000 to help keep a unique High Arctic research station from closing after its federal funding stops, says the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences. The Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory, or PEARL, is the northern-most civilian research station in Canada. The laboratory takes measurements on greenhouse gases and ozone and verifies the accuracy of satellite data, among other things. It contributes data to several international projects monitoring climate change.

“Donations range from $5 up to over $1,000 and they come from coast to coast, from students, from people from all walks of life who are responding to the fact that this unique research station will not continue,” said Dawn Conway, executive director of the foundation. She says about 80 people have donated since the Canadian Network for the Detection of Atmospheric Change announced the station would not be able to continue year-round.

“I’m really impressed with Canadians,” said Kim Strong, an atmospheric physics professor at the University of Toronto who takes a team to the station each spring to measure air quality, pollution and greenhouse gases. “It’s quite heartwarming. We’ve received a lot of expressions of support, which are just as welcome as the funding,” she said.

Tagged: Arctic, News, Research infrastructure

(CBC News, 21 February 2012) -- The Royal Canadian Geographic Society will recognize scientist Martin Bergmann, who died in a plane crash in Nunavut last year, with a medal in his honour. Bergmann, who lived in Winnipeg, was the director of the Polar Continental Shelf Program in Resolute, Nunavut. He was among the victims in the Aug. 20 crash of a First Air Boeing 737 that was attempting to land in the High Arctic community. The award will recognize excellence in Arctic leadership, science and exploration.

Mary-Ellen Thomas, executive director of the Nunavut Research Institute, said she hopes the award inspires northerners to continue Bergmann's work. Thomas said his gift was his ability to lead and break down barriers between agencies and organizations.

"This award is to recognize Marty's leadership in science, his innovation, just his ability to communicate with northerners," she said. "I'm quite excited that the award has been initiated. I think it will be a great opportunity for northerners to try to achieve."

Tagged: Arctic, Awards, etc., News

(China.org, 24 February 2012) -- China will beef up its effort to explore the North Pole and plan two Arctic expeditions before 2015, according to the Chinese Arctic and Antarctic Administration. With the building of a new icebreaker in 2013, China can sail two polar expedition vessels at the same time in the North and South poles, said Wang Qiyi, senior engineer of the National Climate Center. The new icebreaker, with an estimated investment of 1.25 billion yuan ($198 million), can push through sea ice more than 1.5-meter thick with 0.2-meter snow covering. The country now has only one icebreaker, Xuelong, or Snow Dragon, for Arctic and Antarctic expeditions, which limits research time for the Arctic expedition.

As a major country in the Northern Hemisphere, China is greatly influenced by climate and environmental changes in the North Pole Its Arctic research mission started in late 1990s -- after the United States, Russia, Britain, France, Canada and Japan. The researches mainly concentrate on physical oceanography, marine biology and marine chemistry.

Tagged: Arctic, News, Planning and Organization, Research infrastructure

University of Zurich press release, 21 February 2012) -- Thawing permafrost will have far-reaching ramifications for populated areas, infrastructure and ecosystems. A geographer from the University of Zurich reveals where it is important to confront the issue based on new permafrost maps -- the most precise global maps around. They depict the global distribution of permafrost in high-resolution images and are available on Google Earth.

Unstable cable-car and electricity pylons and rock fall – Alpine countries like Switzerland have already had first-hand experience of thawing permafrost as a result of climate change. If temperatures continue to rise, the problem will intensify in many places. Permafrost, namely rock or soil with a negative temperature for at least two years, occurs in the subsurface and therefore cannot be mapped directly. The existing maps are thus fraught with major uncertainties that have barely been studied or formulated. Furthermore, due to the different modeling methods used the maps are difficult to compare.

Now, however, glaciologist Stephan Gruber from the University of Zurich has modeled the global permafrost zones for the first time in high resolution and using a consistent method. In his study recently published in The Cryosphere, the scientist estimates the global permafrost regions at 22 million square kilometers – a sixth of the world's exposed land surface. With a grid resolution of one square kilometer, Gruber's maps are the most precise permafrost maps in the world.

Posted by Amanda Graham – 21 February 2012; 11:24:30 PM – Permalink  GlobalPermafrostZonationIndexMap.kmz

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

(Nicholas Wade/New York Times, 20 February 2012) -- Living plants have been generated from the fruit of a little arctic flower, the narrow-leafed campion, that died 32,000 years ago, a team of Russian scientists reports. The fruit was stored by an arctic ground squirrel in its burrow on the tundra of northeastern Siberia and lay permanently frozen until excavated by scientists a few years ago. This would be the oldest plant by far that has ever been grown from ancient tissue. The present record is held by a date palm grown from a seed some 2,000 years old that was recovered from the ancient fortress of Masada in Israel.

The new report is by a team led by Svetlana Yashina and David Gilichinsky of the Russian Academy of Sciences research center at Pushchino, near Moscow, and appears in Tuesday’s issue of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. “This is an amazing breakthrough,” said Grant Zazula of the Yukon Paleontology Program at Whitehorse in Yukon Territory, Canada. “I have no doubt in my mind that this is a legitimate claim.” It was Dr. Zazula who showed that the apparently ancient lupine seeds found by the Yukon gold miner were in fact modern. ...

The Russian researchers excavated ancient squirrel burrows exposed on the bank of the lower Kolyma River, an area thronged with mammoth and woolly rhinoceroses during the last ice age. Soon after being dug, the burrows were sealed with windblown earth, buried under 125 feet of sediment and permanently frozen at minus 7 degrees Celsius. Some of the storage chambers in the burrows contain more than 600,000 seeds and fruits. Many are from a species that most closely resembles a plant found today, the narrow-leafed campion (Silene stenophylla).

Working with a burrow from the site called Duvanny Yar, the Russian researchers tried to germinate the campion seeds, but failed. They then took cells from the placenta, the organ in the fruit that produces the seeds. They thawed out the cells and grew them in culture dishes into whole plants. ... They grew 36 ancient plants, which appeared identical to the present day narrow-leafed campion until they flowered, when they produced narrower and more splayed-out petals. ... The Russian team says it obtained a radiocarbon date of 31,800 years from seeds attached to the same placenta from which the living plants were propagated. ...

Eske Willerslev, an expert on ancient DNA at the University of Copenhagen, said the finding was “plausible in principle,” given the conditions in permafrost. But the claim depends on the radiocarbon date being correct: “It’s all resting on that — if there’s something wrong there it can all fall part.” ...

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

(Randy Boswell/Vancouver Sun, 31 January 2012) -- Melting icefields on Baffin Island, one of the clearest signs of climate change on Earth, have yielded the strongest evidence yet for the timing and cause of another major climate event from the planet's past: the so-called Little Ice Age, a sudden and mysterious cooling of the globe that began about 700 years ago. Recently exposed remains of plants that had been buried under Baffin Island ice for centuries provided the crucial clue that has led an international team of researchers to conclude the Little Ice Age was triggered by volcanic eruptions between 1275 and 1300 and was sustained by changes in Arctic sea-ice cover that lasted several centuries.

Writing in the latest issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the team of 13 scientists from the U.S., Iceland and Britain notes that, "there is no clear consensus on the timing, duration, or controlling mechanisms" of the Little Ice Age, which has been attributed by some experts to the onset of a period of reduced heat from the sun. Without fully discounting the influence of the solar radiation cycle on the medieval cooling trend, the researchers found, however, clear indications on Baffin Island that mosses and other plants that had thrived in the centuries before AD 1300 were suddenly killed during a time marked by cataclysmic discharges from volcanoes erupting in the Southern Hemisphere.

A similar series of tropical volcanic eruptions around 1450, which initially blocked sunlight but also extended Arctic ice cover and increased ice-berg production in the North Atlantic, coincided with another pulse of ice-field growth and the flash-freeze killing of plants at different locations on the Nunavut island. Significantly, the authors note, the "entombed vegetation" found at sites along a 1,000-km stretch of Baffin Island has only become apparent in recent years as "rapidly melting ice caps" in Arctic Canada began to reveal plant material unseen since the Middle Ages.

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

(CBC News, 13 February 2012) -- Arctic scholar, activist and politician Bob Williamson has died. He passed away Sunday morning in his sleep at the age of 80.

Born in England, he began a long career in the North during a winter in Fort Simpson, N.W.T., when he began recording Dene folklore. He founded the Eskimology section at the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs. He was also an Anthropology professor at the University of Saskatchewan, where he pioneered the University's Arctic Research and Training Centre.

In the 1960s, he spent two terms as a member of the legislative council for the Northwest Territories representing the Keewatin. Williamson also worked with Inuit Tapirisat of Canada, the Canadian Eskimo Arts Council, the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, and the CBC Northern Service. He was invested into the Order of Canada in 1983, and was named Professor Emeritus upon his retirement from the University of Saskatchewan.

He was married to scholar Karla Jessen Williamson. He had two children from his second marriage and four children from his first marriage.

Tagged: Arctic, News

(JAVMA News, 1 February 2012) -- The investigation into a fatal disease among ringed seals in the Arctic and Bering Strait regions of Alaska has intensified following a federal agency's determination the outbreak constitutes an "unusual mortality event."

The decision by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration this past December means additional resources will be dedicated to identifying what's behind the illnesses and deaths of more than 100 seals since the summer (see JAVMA, Dec. 15, 2011, page 1524). As of press time in January, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service [USFWS] had not determined whether it would declare the outbreak an unusual event. More than 60 dead and 75 diseased seals, mostly ringed seals, have been reported in Alaska since July 2011, with reports continuing to come in. USFWS scientists have also identified diseased and dead walruses along Point Lay in northwest Alaska.

Federal law authorizes the allocation of additional personnel, finances, and other resources in response to incidents involving unusually high mortality rates among marine mammals. Fifty-five unusual mortality events have been formally recognized in U.S. waters since the program was started in 1991. Seals and walruses suffering from the mystery disease develop skin sores, usually on the hind flippers or face, and patchy hair loss. Some of the diseased mammals have labored breathing and appear lethargic.

Scientists have not yet identified a single cause for this disease, although tests indicate a virus is not the cause. At necropsy, most of the affected animals have had skin lesions as well as fluid in the lungs, white spots on the liver, and abnormal growths in the brain. Some seals and walruses have undersized lymph nodes, which may indicate compromised immune systems. Testing continues for a wide range of possible factors that may be responsible for the animals' condition, including immune-system-related diseases, fungi, man-made toxins and biotoxins, radiation exposure, contaminants, and stressors related to sea ice change.

Tagged: Arctic, News

(Sarah Rogers/Nunatsiaq, 31 January 2012) -- Is a newly-released study on the behaviour and diet of killer whales in the Canadian Arctic proof that the science community is finally warming up to traditional Inuit knowledge? Paul Irngaut, a wildlife adviser with Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. thinks so.

University of Manitoba researchers recently interviewed more than 100 Inuit hunters and elders to gather information on the recent influx of killer whales into Nunavut waters, as the sea ice melts and enlarges their habitat. Although little was known about the animal’s behaviour in new regions, scientists were able to hear first-hand from hunters who have observed killer whales, or aarluk in action for many years.

“Inuit traditional knowledge is essential to scientific research,” Irngaut said. “It’s verified by local hunters year after year. It’s not projections or predictions — it’s current and it’s accurate.” “Our hope is that [other Arctic-based research] will take traditional Inuit knowledge more seriously,” he added. Irngaut says that, often times, scientific research confirms what Inuit already know.

Tagged: Arctic, News, Research conduct and ethics

(Science Daily, 1 February 2012) -- Yellow-cedar, a culturally and economically valuable tree in southeastern Alaska and adjacent parts of British Columbia, has been dying off across large expanses of these areas for the past 100 years. But no one could say why -- until now.

"The cause of tree death, called yellow-cedar decline, is now known to be a form of root freezing that occurs during cold weather in late winter and early spring, but only when snow is not present on the ground," explains Pacific Northwest Research Station scientist Paul Hennon, co-lead of a synthesis paper recently published in the February issue of the journal BioScience. "When present, snow protects the fine, shallow roots from extreme soil temperatures. The shallow rooting of yellow-cedar, early spring growth, and its unique vulnerability to freezing injury also contribute to this problem."

Yellow-cedar decline affects about 60 to 70 percent of trees in forests covering 600,000 acres in Alaska and British Columbia. The paper, "Shifting Climate, Altered Niche, and a Dynamic Conservation Strategy for Yellow-Cedar in the North Pacific Coastal Rainforest," summarizes 30 years of research and offers a framework for a conservation strategy for yellow-cedar in Alaska.

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

(Catherine L. Carry, Kath Clarida, Denise Rideout, Dianne Kinnon, Rhonda M. Johnson/Polar Research, 31 January 2012) -- The three-part television broadcast Qanuqtuurniq – finding the balance was an International Polar Year communications and outreach project concerning Inuit health and wellness. The goal of this project was to engage the Inuit public and others in ‘‘real-time’’ dialogue about health and wellness issues and health research, and to deliver key messages. It was aired live in the Inuit language (with English captions/sub-titles) from Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada, in May 2009 and simultaneously webcast. Qanuqtuurniq – finding the balance used an Inuit communications model for remote communities that was developed in the Arctic in 1994 by the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation/Inuit Communications.

... more than 250 people were engaged through the use of a diverse range of methods, including content working groups, stakeholder input, music recordings, pre-recorded community programme videos, live and public screening of the broadcasts, live panels, live audiences, public phone-ins, Skype video-conferencing and real-time online chat, focus groups and e-mail. This article examines the project in light of the principles of ‘‘community engagement’’, demonstrating that Qanuqtuurniq – finding the balance exemplifies community engagement in a number of significant ways, including heavily involving community members in the selection of the health theme content of the televised programmes and through the formation of focus groups.

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

(Hannah Hoag/Nature News Blog, 30 January 2012) -- Canada’s Arctic research vessel the CCGS Amundsen has been put out of action while it awaits engine repairs, forcing researchers to cancel the ship’s research programme for 2012. A routine inspection in December 2011 revealed cracks on four of the ships six engines. “She can’t go into the Arctic this summer,” says Martin Fortier, executive director of ArcticNet, a research network based at Laval University in Quebec City, Quebec, that provides funding and logistics for Arctic research in Canada. “But if it had to happen, this was a good year for it.” Fortier says the plans to repair the ship are still being formed, but that he is confident it will be ready for the 2013 research season.

ArcticNet had been planning a relatively small expedition for the Amundsen this year, with only two six-week legs that did not involve major partnerships or international collaborations. The ship normally averages about 150 research days at sea each year, but during the International Polar Year (which lasted from March 2007 to March 2009), the Amundsen spent 460 days at sea. Fortier says that researchers will have to rely on other vessels to collect data from moorings in the Beaufort Sea and Hudson Bay, a core activity of the programme.

“We plan to save much of the funding dedicated to this year to build up a stronger 2013 programme,” says Fortier. “Many researchers would rather that we leave the ship longer in specific areas to carry out a more extensive programme, for example in Baffin Bay, and that will likely happen because we’ll have more funding for next year’s operation.”

Tagged: Arctic, News, Research

(RIA Novosti via Voice of Russia, 23 January 2012) -- More than one thousand politicians and scientists from Russia, Finland, the United States and Canada have gathered for an Arctic conference in the Norwegian city of Tromsø. The participants in the Arctic Frontiers Conference will focus on the fuel resources of the Arctic and how to develop them without damaging the environment, Tromsø Mayor Jens Johan Hjort said. They will also discuss major oil and gas projects and the outcome of recent research. The Arctic Frontiers Conference will last one week.

Tagged: Arctic, News, Public events and conferences

(BioMed Central press release, 29 January 2012) -- Killer whales (Orcinus orca) are the top marine predator, wherever they are found, and seem to eat everything from schools of small fish to large baleen whales, over twice their own size. The increase in hunting territories available to killer whales in the Arctic due to climate change and melting sea ice could seriously affect the marine ecosystem balance. New research published in BioMed Central's re-launched open access journal Aquatic Biosystems has combined scientific observations with Canadian Inuit traditional knowledge to determine killer whale behaviour and diet in the Arctic. Orca have been studied extensively in the northeast Pacific ocean, where resident killer whales eat fish, but migrating whales eat marine mammals. Five separate ecotypes in the Antarctic have been identified, each preferring a different type of food, and similar patterns have been found in the Atlantic, tropical Pacific, and Indian oceans. However, little is known about Arctic killer whale prey preference or behaviour.

Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) is increasingly being used to supplement scientific observations. Researchers from Manitoba visited 11 Canadian Nunavut Inuit communities and collated information from over 100 interviews with hunters and elders. The Inuit reported that killer whales would 'eat whatever they can catch', mainly other marine mammals including seals (ringed, harp, bearded, and hooded) and whales (narwhal, beluga and bowhead). However there was no indication that Arctic killer whales ate fish. Only seven of the interviewees suggested that killer whales ate fish, but none of them had ever seen it themselves.

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

(U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Geological Survey press release, 23 January 2012) -- Denver, CO - A pioneering airborne electromagnetic survey in the Yukon Flats near Fort Yukon, Alaska, by the U.S. Geological Survey has yielded unprecedented images of the presence and absence of permafrost to depths of roughly 328 feet. The airborne survey captured images of permafrost over a substantially larger area, and with greater data density, than has been previously achieved using sparse boreholes and ground-based geophysics.

"Liquid water conducts electricity better than ice," explained USGS director Marcia McNutt. "We can detect from the air the weak magnetic fields generated by those electric currents, thus distinguishing quickly and easily melted from frozen ground. This new technology, and the maps of changing permafrost, will be valuable for both climate change research and engineering in the challenging Alaskan environment." Because the Yukon Flats is near the boundary between continuous permafrost to the north and discontinuous permafrost to the south, it is an important place to study permafrost dynamics.

Dr. Burke Minsley, geophysicist in the USGS’ Crustal Geophysics and Geochemistry Science Center in Denver and lead author of the study in Geophysical Research Letters, and his team surveyed more than 116 square miles centered 140 miles northeast of Fairbanks. Their data not only capture in detail the distribution of permafrost and its relation to surface- and groundwater features, but also the legacy of the Yukon River lateral migration over a period of roughly 1,000 years as manifested as a thawed region of permafrost.

Knowledge of the current permafrost distribution is critical for analyses designed to evaluate hydrologic and ecologic consequences of climate warming. It also provides a baseline for future investigation of the dynamic evolution of permafrost systems. In addition, the study is important because it presents a methodology for assessing permafrost not only in Alaska but throughout sub-Arctic and Arctic regions.

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

(American Geophysical Union press release via Physorg.com, 31 December 2012) -- The relationship between permafrost, Arctic vegetation, soil erosion, and changing air temperatures is complicated at best. For instance, rising temperatures melt surface permafrost layers and increase shrub growth. These shrubs can catch drifting snow, insulating the soil during the winter, and accelerate permafrost degradation—facilitating their own proliferation. Alternatively, increased vegetation can shift energy transfer dynamics, cooling the surface and protecting permafrost. Hence, expanding Arctic shrub populations may either reinforce or counteract permafrost erosion. The complexity of the interactions makes firsthand accounts of these dynamics particularly important.

To figure out how the permafrost ecosystem has evolved under modern warming for the northernmost reaches of Alaska, Tape et al. pulled observations from a diverse set of sources. The authors took sediment cores from lake beds in the study area to determine changes in sedimentation rates, and hence watershed erosion, for the past 60–100 years. Tree ring analyses indicate the changing growth rates of tall shrubs, and satellite observations show changes in shrub extent. The authors find that erosion rates were increasing or fluctuating prior to 1980, after which they declined for three of the four lakes under investigation. The authors suggest that this reduction in erosion rate was driven by the observed 18 percent increase in the coverage of tall shrub, whose roots could have helped stabilize the soil. The authors suggest that their technique, of using lake bed soil cores to detect permafrost degradation at the watershed scale, will be particularly important for furthering the understanding of the changing Arctic.

More information: "Twentieth century erosion in Arctic Alaska foothills: The influence of shrubs, runoff, and permafrost," Journal of Geophysical Research-Biogeosciences, doi: 10.1029/2011JG001795 , 2011.

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

(Sandra Hines/UW Today, 4 January 2012) -- A hemisphere-wide phenomenon – and not just regional forces – has caused record-breaking amounts of freshwater to accumulate in the Arctic’s Beaufort Sea. Frigid freshwater flowing into the Arctic Ocean from three of Russia’s mighty rivers was diverted hundreds of miles to a completely different part of the ocean in response to a decades-long shift in atmospheric pressure associated with the phenomenon called the Arctic Oscillation, according to findings published in the Jan. 5 issue of Nature.

The new findings show that a low pressure pattern created by the Arctic Oscillation from 2005 to 2008 drew Russian river water away from the Eurasian Basin, between Russia and Greenland, and into the Beaufort Sea, a part of the Canada Basin bordered by the United States and Canada. It was like adding 10 feet (3 meters) of freshwater over the central part of the Beaufort Sea.

“Knowing the pathways of freshwater in the upper ocean is important to understanding global climate because of freshwater’s role in protecting sea ice – it can help create a barrier between the ice and warmer ocean water below – and its role in global ocean circulation. Too much freshwater exiting the Arctic would inhibit the interplay of cold water from the poles and warm water from the tropics,” said Jamie Morison, an oceanographer with the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory and lead author of the Nature paper.

See JPL press release on this study.

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

(Elena Kovachich, Voice of Russia, 3 January 2012) -- A floating university for Arctic research and Arctic staff training will be created in the Russian northern port city of Arkhangelsk. Lectures and practical courses will take place aboard the Professor Molchanov research vessel. A pilot project of the Arctic Federal University and the Arctic Hydro-Meteorological Service will give the students a real feel of what the Arctic is like. Twenty-five Arctic University students, a team of meteorologists and a group of researchers from the Institute of the Arctic and Antarctica will take part in the expedition.

An Arctic University professor, Alexander Guryev, gave us some details: "The main aim of the expedition is to study ocean currents and sea ice, although our ship is not of the ice class. We will also explore some coastal areas of the White Sea, including the Solovetsky Archipelago and the Spitsbergen Island – the biological aspect, pollution, the flora and fauna."

The expedition will enable the students to acquire invaluable scientific and life experience and to contribute to Arctic exploration. Vladimir Shevchenko, a senior researcher at the Institute of Oceanology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, told the Voice of Russia that some of the past research programs would also be resumed: "In the early 20th century, Russian vessels began sailing regularly along one and the same line from south to north, taking hydrological measurements – temperature, salinity and lots of other parameters. Similar measurements have been repeatedly taken over several decades along the so-called 'ages-old cut of the Barents Sea' about 40 degrees east latitude. There has been much concern over global warming lately. In order to assert anything with statistical accuracy, one needs to know how temperatures changed within a century. This work needs to be resumed."

Tagged: Arctic, Education and outreach, News, Research

(CBC News, 16 December 2011) -- A senior federal official says there will be no cuts to ozone monitoring stations in the Arctic. Environment Canada is reducing its ozone monitoring program but at a meeting this week of the federal environment committee, Karen Dodds, a senior environment official, said the stations in Canada’s far north would be maintained.

There are three ozone monitoring stations in the Arctic — in Alert, Eureka and Resolute. Tom Duck, an atmospheric scientist at Dalhousie University, said scientists only recently found a hole in the ozone over the Arctic and that northern monitoring is crucial. "These northern stations are really important,” he said. “They're important for ozone, looking for ozone holes, and really detecting fingerprints of ozone depletion. If they were to be reduced in their service we wouldn't be able to see ozone holes as well. Ozone holes appear at different places in the Arctic and so you actually need a rather sizable network of stations in order to look at the problem properly and understand really what's going on up there.

“Canada's an awfully big country,” he said. “There are only seven stations in southern Canada, there are only three in the Arctic. So that's not really getting a whole lot of coverage. In fact, we'd really like to see more Arctic stations. It would make perfect sense to have a station in Iqaluit, for example." There's no word yet on what will happen to the monitoring stations in southern Canada.

Tagged: Arctic, News, Research infrastructure

(Jeff Richardson/Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, 13 December 2011) -- FAIRBANKS - Budget cuts are forcing the closure in spring of Alaska’s federal agriculture research station, including a newly built $1.2 million greenhouse and research complex in Fairbanks. A roughly $40 million cut to the Agricultural Research Service is resulting in the elimination of 10 stations throughout the country, said ARS spokeswoman Sandy Miller Hays. That includes all work under way at the Subarctic ARS station in Alaska, including projects in Fairbanks, Palmer and Kodiak.

The planned ARS closures stem from a spending bill passed by Congress in November that included a cut to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The cut came with some warning — President Obama proposed the elimination of the stations in his budget proposal early this year. About 10 federal employees throughout the state will be affected by the closure, USDA spokesman Matt Herrick said in an email. A number of University of Alaska Fairbanks students working and studying at the ARS station will also be out of work, said Carol Lewis, dean of the School of Natural Resources and Agricultural Science. Lewis said the transfer of the five Fairbanks ARS employees to other stations in the Western United States could take effect as early as March but that the employees will have the option of retiring or leaving the service. While research would be able to continue until spring, she said, no additional field work will take place.

The Subarctic ARS station specialized in agricultural pest management, Lewis said, and a focus on insects, weeds and pesticides was largely avoided by UAF to prevent duplication. The Palmer station focuses on collecting northern plant samples, while the Kodiak office has studied techniques for using fish waste for agriculture.

Tagged: Arctic, News, Research infrastructure

(Ohio State University press release via redOrbit, 11 December 2011) -- A higher-than-normal 2010 melting season sped up the melting of ice in southern Greenland, causing sizable portions of the island’s bedrock to rise somewhere about a quarter of an inch more than usual, an Ohio State University (OSU) researcher said on Friday.

According to an OSU press release, Michael Bevis, Ohio Eminent Scholar in Geodynamics and professor in the OSU School of Earth Sciences, said that 50 GPS stations spread across the coast of Greenland normally “detect uplift of 15 mm (0.59 inches) or more, year after year. But a temperature spike in 2010 lifted the bedrock a detectably higher amount over a short five-month period – as high as 20 mm (0.79 inches) in some locations.”

Those comments came during a presentation by Bevis, who serves as the principal investigator for the Greenland GPS Network (GNET), at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting in San Francisco. He also addressed what implication the findings could have in relation to climate change, saying that “pulses of extra melting and uplift imply that we’ll experience pulses of extra sea level rise… The process is not really a steady process.” In a December 9 article, UPI also said that the Bevis believes that uplift was the result of accelerated ice loss in the region, noting that the southern part of Greenland lost an extra 100 billion tons of ice due to the above average conditions.

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

(Arctic Council Indigenous Peoples' Secretariat, 7 December 2011) -- Anne-Marith Rasmussen is working on a PhD project on young people and multiculture in Kirkenes; the easternmost town in North Norway close to the Russian and Finnish border. When she started to plan her project, she wished to find a place that could represent North Norwegian multiculturalism, and Kirkenes is a good example of that. Due to changing historical circumstances today Norwegian, Saami, Kven, Russian, Finnish and immigrants from all over the world live there. Because of the history of multiculturalism in North Norway there seems to be a more positive and open-minded understanding of cultural and ethnic differences than in South Norway.

Her professional background has root in a very strong tradition of Educational Anthropology at Tromsø University, Norway. She has particularly developed an interest for minority/majority power relations. “Many scientist who work with minority issues are concerned to highlight the minority perspective in order to better understand it,” she says. “That is very important research. However, I focus my research on the relations between majority and minority. I have not been particularly interested in studying Saami or another ethnic group’s issues but how individuals with different ethnic or cultural backgrounds interact in a given setting. Another concern of mine is how other axis of similarities and differences – gender, social class, sexual orientation or age – influence on the similarities and differences relating to culture and ethnicity.”

Rasmussen is doing fieldwork at the High School in Kirkenes. “It is a very interesting school. It has students from Kirkenes and from other places in North Norway, high school and technical school students, and students with different ethnic and national backgrounds, all under the same roof. I think it is a fantastic melting pot and a good place to study how minorities and majorities interact with each other, and that was why I chose that place to do my fieldwork.” She is very concerned about which experience of possibilities and constraints the different individuals have, if they feel they can live on their own premises or not, and what strategies they use to characterise themselves and each other when they interact.

Tagged: Arctic, News, Research

(University of Florida and University of Alaska Fairbanks press release via redOrbit, 1 December 2011) -- According to a survey published in the November 30 issue of the journal Nature, melting permafrost in the northern climes is releasing large amounts of methane and carbon, amplifying the global warming effect. When permafrost melts, long dormant microbes come alive and break down the organic matter underneath the layers of frozen soil creating methane. Methane gas has 2.5 times the effect on the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, creating a greater warming effect.

The survey, led by Edward Schuur from the University of Florida and graduate student Benjamin Abbott from the University of Alaska Fairbanks asked climate scientists what percentage of the permafrost will thaw, how much carbon will be emitted and how much of that carbon is methane. The researchers estimate by 2100 that the amount of carbon released from these largely untapped stores of carbon will be 1.7 to 5.2 times larger than recent modeling studies show.

According to Abbott, “The larger estimate is due to the inclusion of processes missing from current models and new estimates of the amount of organic carbon stored deep in frozen soils. There’s more organic carbon in northern soils than there is in all living things combined; it’s kind of mind boggling.” According to estimates there are 1,700 gigatons of organic carbon stored within the northern soils, four times more than all the carbon ever emitted by modern human activity and twice that currently being held in the atmosphere.

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

(Jane George/Nunatsiaq News, 24 November 2011) -- KUUJJUAQ - If you’re a high school student in Nunavut or Nunavik hoping to graduate in 2012, what are your options for post-secondary education? Soon you’ll be able to find that out more easily, by consulting a new website listing all the post-secondary education courses and programs aimed at northern students. Promoting current post-secondary programs is another step towards founding a university in Canada’s Arctic, one that will build on what already exists, says Thierry Rodon, a Laval university professor and instructor with Carleton University.

Rodon is leading a three-year project for the ArcticNet research network that will make recommendations on how to establish a northern university and improve Inuit access to post-secondary education. If any consensus has emerged a year into this research project, it’s that northern students want more than a virtual university which offers online courses, like UArctic’s “university without walls.” And they crave a “student experience” that involves fellow students and real flesh-and-blood teachers.

“You need a person. Education is a relationship,” Rodon stated in a Nov. 23 interview. But there’s also acknowledgement that finding millions of dollars to build a new university campus anywhere in the North will be hard to come by. So there’s agreement that a Canadian Arctic university should draw on what’s already available in terms of program and courses. And it should start off by using facilities that already exist. This idea resembles a proposal which has already been promoted by Yukon’s government and discussed among the three territorial colleges. A chance to discuss the past, present and future of post-secondary Inuit education drew a dozen participants to a workshop led by Rodon Nov. 22 in Kuujjuaq.

Tagged: Arctic, News, NorthernU

(Susan Kraemer/Clean Technica, 26 November 2011) -- If climate change continues along the business-as-usual path, the 24th century’s new world will be in some ways more like the world of Ancient Greece – with what’s left of the world’s inhabitants trading around a single sea. For the Ancient Greeks, it was the Mediterranean Sea. For those of our descendants that survive, it will be what is now the Arctic circle. ... The countries that will remain habitable after 300 years of climate change are centered on the now nearly empty lands around the Arctic Circle: clockwise this [is] Siberia [Russia], Finland, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Greenland [Denmark], Canada, Alaska [United States]. ...

In The North: The New European Frontier with Global Warming, Professor Trausti Valsson of the University of Iceland Faculty of Engineering argues for the inclusion of ”Iceland, Norway and Russia (because of Siberia) in the European Union, because the importance of these areas in the future, economically, militarily and as a future living space for the European community.” None of the three nations are currently members of the EU.

Valsson’s argument is that, combined with the uninhabitability of the rest of the planet as the world warms, that the shorter and more secure transportation routes across the Arctic Ocean between Europe and north-western Canada and the USA will make a completely different center to the world. Valsson includes this map [at right] showing the region that climate scientists projected to be become uninhabitable by 2300. Because of the scarcity of continental land below this region, the world’s population will have to concentrate towards the top of this map within three centuries, because of limits to human tolerance of heat.

Tagged: Arctic, News

(University of Alaska Fairbanks press release, 17 November 2011) -- Fairbanks, Alaska - The National Science Foundation awarded $16.3 million to the University of Alaska Fairbanks in support of the Toolik Field Station, a major site for national and international research in the North American Arctic since 1975. "With this award Toolik Field Station is now considered a major NSF facility, said Marion Syndonia "Donie" Bret-Harte, principal investigator for the award and scientist at UAF's Institute of Arctic Biology, which operates the station.

The five-year cooperative agreement, the third from NSF since 2000, will enable the station to increase and improve the provision of housing, utilities, meals, communications, modern lab space, vehicles and common-use science equipment to the hundreds of scientists and students who work at the station each year. "This is more than a supplies and logistics award," said Bret-Harte. TFS is currently host to NSF's Arctic Long-Term Ecological Research and Arctic Observatory Network programs and is a member of the International Network for Terrestrial Research and Monitoring in the Arctic. TFS has also been selected as the arctic site for the National Ecological Observatory Network program.

Tagged: Arctic, News, Research infrastructure

(Arnfinn Christensen/ScienceNordic, 16 November 2011) -- When a glacier calves into the ocean scientists see the same patterns that are found in brain impulses and other complex, unpredictable systems. What happens when a glaciologist brings a brain specialist to arctic Svalbard to study the ways that glaciers calve? “It was rewarding and fun collaborating with a researcher who had never seen a glacier before,” says glaciologist Anne Chapuis at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (UMB) at Ås.

“This was my first experience with such an interdisciplinary project,” says Tom Tetzlaff. He is a physicist but now works in the field of computational neuroscience at UMB. Chapuis got together with Tetzlaff through her need to understand the complicated patterns she found in data about 7,000 calvings. “We’ve studied the frequency of various sized calvings,” says Tetzlaff. The researchers found a strong connection with things such as processes in the Earth’s crust, money markets – and nerve impulses in the brain.

Tagged: Arctic, News, Research

(Norden News, 16 November 2011) -- An English-language news service featuring research from the Nordic countries has just been launched. ScienceNordic will present daily news items to an international audience. The actual research has long been international and Nordic researchers work at global level, often in international networks. They also regularly co-publish along with colleagues from other countries and use English as the academic language.

"For some reason, publicity about Nordic research has been remarkably local though," explains Nina Kristiansen, editor of forskning.no and co-editor of ScienceNordic for the next two years. American and British media and institutions currently dominate the scene when it comes to spreading news and information about research. They have greater resources and a natural advantage in terms of language, so journalists all over the world write stories about American research findings. "The findings generated by Nordic research are equally good and equally newsworthy. There has been a knowledge gap in the market, and we aim to plug it," says Vibeke Hjortlund, editor of Videnskab.dk.

"ScienceNordic will prioritise disciplines in which the Nordic countries stand out or have a particularly positive record, e.g. alternative energy, the climate, the environment, oil, biotechnology, gender equality and the economics of the welfare state," Kristiansen adds. ScienceNordic covers all five Nordic countries, as well as Greenland, the Faroe Islands and Åland. Videnskab.dk and forskning.no have received seed funding for ScienceNordic from Nordforsk, the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research and the Danish Ministry of Education. The web address is http://sciencenordic.com/

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

(Summit County Citizens Voice, 14 November 2011) -- SUMMIT COUNTY - Forests at the edge of Alaska’s tundra have put on a growth spurt in the past hundred years, and especially since about 1950, according to researchers with Columbia University’s LaMont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

The scientists recently completed a detailed tree-ring study dating back to 1067. The results suggest that at least some forests may be adapting the rapidly warming climate in the Arctic. Global temperatures have climbed about 1.6 degrees since the 1950s, but some parts of northern latitudes have climbed about 4 to 5 degrees during that same span.

“For the moment, warmer temperatures are helping the trees along the tundra,” said study coauthor Kevin Anchukaitis, a tree-ring scientist at Lamont. “It’s a fairly wet, fairly cool, site overall, so those longer growing seasons allow the trees to grow more.”

The study, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, spans 1,000 years and bolsters the idea that far northern ecosystems may play a future role in the balance of planet-warming carbon dioxide that remains in the air. It also strengthens support for an alternative technique for teasing climate data from trees in the far north, sidestepping recent methodological objections from climate skeptics.

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

(University of Colorado at Boulder press release, 14 November 2011) -- A team of researchers led by the University of Colorado Boulder has discovered the first prehistoric bronze artifact made from a cast ever found in Alaska, a small, buckle-like object found in an ancient Eskimo dwelling and which likely originated in East Asia.

The artifact consists of two parts -- a rectangular bar, connected to an apparently broken circular ring, said CU-Boulder Research Associate John Hoffecker, who is leading the excavation project. The object, about 2 inches by 1 inch and less than 1 inch thick, was found in August by a team excavating a roughly 1,000-year-old house that had been dug into the side of a beach ridge by early Inupiat Eskimos at Cape Espenberg on the Seward Peninsula, which lies within the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve. Both sections of the artifact are beveled on one side and concave on the other side, indicating it was manufactured in a mold, said Hoffecker, a fellow at CU-Boulder's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. A small piece of leather found wrapped around the rectangular bar by the research team yielded a radiocarbon date of roughly A.D. 600, which does not necessarily indicate the age of the object, he said. "I was totally astonished," said Hoffecker.

"The object appears to be older than the house we were excavating by at least a few hundred years." Hoffecker and his CU-Boulder colleague Owen Mason said the bronze object resembles a belt buckle and may have been used as part of a harness or horse ornament prior to its arrival in Alaska. While they speculated the Inupiat Eskimos could have used the artifact as a clasp for human clothing or perhaps as part of a shaman's regalia, its function on both continents still remains a puzzle, they said.

Since bronze metallurgy from Alaska is unknown, the artifact likely was produced in East Asia and reflects long-distance trade from production centers in either Korea, China, Manchuria or southern Siberia, according to Mason. It conceivably could have been traded from the steppe region of southern Siberia, said Hoffecker, where people began casting bronze several thousand years ago. Alternatively, some of the earliest Inupiat Eskimos in northwest Alaska -- the direct ancestors of modern Eskimos thought to have migrated into Alaska from adjacent Siberia some 1,500 years ago -- might have brought the object with them from the other side of the Bering Strait. "It was possibly valuable enough so that people hung onto it for generations, passing it down through families," said Mason, an INSTAAR affiliate and co-investigator on the Cape Espenberg excavations.

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

(Ned Rozell/Alaska Science Forum via Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, 13 November 2011) -- FAIRBANKS - There’s a new kind of dinosaur out there, and it lived in Alaska. Its bones, long turned to stone, are part of a cliff in northern Alaska. That’s where dinosaur-hunter Tony Fiorillo brushed dirt away from a portion of its massive skull, something that most of us would mistake for a rock.

The year was 2006. It was August and summer had fled the Colville River, if it had been there at all. Fiorillo, who visits Alaska each summer from Dallas, where he works at the Museum of Nature and Science, remembers climbing from his tent with a heavy head every morning. He later learned he was working with pneumonia. On one wet, miserable day, Fiorillo was clinging to a hillside above the river, spading the soil gently with a trowel. Noticing an unusual lump, he picked up a brush to gently whisk the dirt away. Suddenly, an entire skull came into focus, and he felt a warm flush of discovery. “When I had that moment of recognition, only (a large nasal bone) was exposed,” Fiorillo said. “But in my mind I could see the rest of the skull.” ...

When he finished, the two paleontologists saw that several features on the skull were different enough from similar dinosaurs that no one had documented it until now. Fiorillo and Tykoski just unveiled the evidence for Pachyrhinosaurus perotorum at a paleontologist’s meeting in Las Vegas, reintroducing to the world an arctic dinosaur that once stomped through the ferns and forests of northern Alaska.

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

(Nunatsiaq News, 11 November 2011) -- The results of the 2011 population survey of Nunavik’s Leaf River caribou herd are in. The survey established the size of the herd at 430,000 caribou — give or take about 98,000 animals, Quebec’s minister of natural resources and wildlife, Serge Simard, announced Nov. 11.

Adult survival rate and the number of calves produced are low, said a government news release. That indicates that this herd is in “a decreasing phase,” confirming what biologists have said about the size and health of the herd. “Although the population of the LRH (Leaf River herd) is still relatively large, we must keep exercising care, since biological monitoring indicate(s) that the herd size is decreasing. It is therefore important to maintain very stringent management objectives,” Simard said.

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

(Arctic Council Indigenous Peoples Secretariat, 1 November 2011) -- Academicus Arcticus is the name of a new prize for young researchers in recognition of their exceptional ability to communicate complex issues to a broad audience. On Tuesday, November 1, the prize was given to Liv Mejer Larsen for her work on the cultural history of growing potatoes in Greenland; Aviaja Lyberth Hauptmann for her work on the biology of South Greenland stalagmites; and Marie Lenander Petersen for her work on the Arctic archeology of whale baleen.

The Arctic Academicus has been initiated by the director of Arktisk Institut, Bent Nielsen, with the financial support of Royal Arctic Line. The articles of the prizewinners are going to be printed in Greenlandic newspaper Sermitsiaq and in Danish magazine Tidsskriftet Grønland.

Tagged: Arctic, Awards, etc., News, Research, Youth Involvement

(DOE/Joint Genome Institute press release via EurekAlert, 6 November 2011) -- WALNUT CREEK/BERKELEY, Calif. - From the North Pole to the Arctic Ocean, the frozen soils within this region keep an estimated 1,672 billion metric tons of carbon out of the Earth's atmosphere. This sequestered carbon is more than 250 times the amount of greenhouse gas emissions attributed to the United States in the year 2009. As global temperatures slowly rise, however, so too do concerns regarding the potential impacts upon the carbon cycle when the permafrost thaws and releases the carbon that has been trapped for eons. Like so many of the planet's critical environmental processes, the smallest players—microbes—have the most significant influence over the eventual outcome.

To answer this question, researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute (JGI), the Earth Sciences Division (ESD) within Berkeley Lab, and the U.S. Geological Survey collaborated to understand how the microbes found in permafrost respond to their warming environment. Among the findings, published online November 6 in the journal Nature, is the draft genome of a novel microbe that produces methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. This microbe, not yet named, lives in the permafrost, and was assembled out of the collection of genomes—the metagenome—isolated from the frigid soil. The assembly challenge is similar to building one complete jigsaw puzzle from a large collection of pieces from many different puzzles.

"The permafrost is poised to become a major source of greenhouse gases as the temperature in the Arctic is expected to increase dramatically compared to the expected temperature increase in many other regions of the world," said ESD's Janet Jansson, corresponding author and initiator of the study (first supported by a grant to her from DOE Laboratory Directed Research and Development funds). "By applying metagenomics to study microbial community composition and function, we can help to answer questions about how the currently uncultivated and unstudied microbial species residing in permafrost cycle organic carbon and release greenhouse gases during thaw," Jansson said. "This will provide valuable information that could lead to improved carbon cycle models and eventual mitigation strategies." ...

The researchers identified many genes involved in carbon and nitrogen cycling in the metagenomic data, and found that their levels of abundance shifted in response to their thawing habitat. "These detailed analyses reveal for the first time the rapid and dynamic response of permafrost microbial communities to thaw," they concluded. "The thaw-induced shifts that we detected directly support conceptual models of carbon and nitrogen cycling in arctic soils, in which microbes play a central role in greenhouse gas emissions and destabilization of stored permafrost carbon."

Tagged: Arctic, News, Research

(University of Texas press release, 4 October 2011) -- AUSTIN, Texas - A team of Arctic researchers led by the University of Texas Marine Science Institute's Ken Dunton will embark on a comprehensive study of the Hanna Shoal ecosystem in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska's northwest coast with a $5.6 million grant from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE). The oil industry is intensely interested in the Chukchi Sea and has plans to drill throughout the area. "This important grant will help us continue studies we began in 2009, which demonstrated that an area known as the Hanna Shoal is an important biological ecosystem in the northern Chukchi Sea," said Dunton, a professor of marine science.

The main objectives of the study, which will be conducted from 2011 to 2016, are to identify and measure physical and biological processes that contribute to the high concentration of marine life in the Hanna Shoal area. "We know the ecosystem is productive," Dunton said. "Now we are asking the questions of why is it so productive and how is it going to change with respect to climatic warming." The study will document ocean circulation, ice conditions and organisms living both on the bottom of the sea and in the water column, such as zooplankton. Bowhead whales depend on zooplankton for food and are valuable culturally to the native Inupiat people of the Arctic coast as part of their subsistence diet, along with seals, fish and walrus.

Tagged: Arctic, News, Research

(Journal of Experimental Biology press release, 28 October 2011) -- Their thick coats are the perfect protection in keeping the cold away from their bodies in the Arctic winters that they endure. But the researchers wondered how they keep cool when they are active and generating heat Arnoldus Blix, one of the authors of the study from the University of Tromsø, Norway, says that these animals have three tactics for staying cool.

The first cooling technique the reindeer use is panting with their mouths closed to evaporate water from the nose. Secondly they pant with their mouths open to evaporate water from the tongue. Finally when their body temperature finally rises to more dangerous levels, around 39 degrees C, they pant with their mouths open and activate an internal cooling system that diverts cooler blood from the front of the face directly to the brain. The reindeer were chosen for the study because of their domesticated nature.

According to Blix, “Reindeer are the best animals to work with; once they trust the trainer they will do anything for you.” The researchers trained the reindeer to run on a treadmill at 9 km/h in temperatures that ranged from 10 degrees C up to 30 degrees C. In the beginning of the run the reindeer had a breath rate of 7 breaths per minute and then the rate increased up to 260 breaths per minute. The high rate of breathing was so the inhaled chilly air and evaporated water from mucous membranes cooled the blood in the nasal sinuses before sending it back into the body through the jugular vein to keep their temperature down, according to Blix. Study findings were published in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

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

(Jane George/Nunatsiaq News, 30 October 2011) -- Monitoring in the Arctic for toxic substances produced in farms and factories located far to the south continues this year, with scientists like Anya Gawor on the look-out for traces of these contaminants in the Arctic air and waters, and even in tiny sea creatures. Gawor, 24, a graduate student at the Univ. of Toronto, spent this month on board the Canadian Coast Guard’s research icebreaker, the Amundsen, as it travelled from Kugluktuk to Quebec City. It’s the second year that Gowar has travelled on the Amundsen to monitor the presence of harmful chemicals in the Arctic. Once in the Arctic, these chemicals are known to work their way up the food chain, where they can cause damage to the health of fish, animals and people.

“These chemicals are known to be harmful for humans and wildlife, and are prevalent in the environment even in remote areas,” Gawor said. But Gawor worries people in the Arctic may not know about the efforts she and others put into contaminant monitoring, because they don’t see her at work or the contaminants she hunts for. “What happens to the contaminants when they reach the Arctic has an impact on people,” Gawor said in a satellite telephone call from on board the icebreaker. “That’s because contaminants can build up in an organism as they go up the food chain.” Those contaminants can end up in high concentrations in marine mammals like polar bears, and even in people. Much of Gawor’s work focuses on trying to figure out whether the contaminants are entering the Arctic through the water or air.

Tagged: Arctic, News

(Sarah Rogers/Nunatsiaq News, 25 October 2011) -- Polar bear management across the circumpolar world needs to build in more traditional Inuit knowledge: that’s the message from a Canadian delegation member attending an international meeting on polar bear management taking place in Iqaluit this week.

Canadian delegate Gabriel Nirlungayuk, the director of wildlife at Nunavut Tunngavik Inc., who met with officials from Denmark (Greenland), Norway, the United States and Russia Oct. 24, says many of these countries base their polar bear management systems on science alone – rather than tapping into the knowledge of Inuit hunters. “Our concern is there’s a lot of scientific information,” Nirlungayuk told Nunatsiaq News. “And it’s very expensive to do scientific studies. [But] there are a lot of boundaries for [polar bear] sub-populations that haven’t been inventoried. What we feel could fill the gap is traditional knowledge, but it’s not widely considered.”

The Iqaluit meeting gathered all the signatories to the 1973 Agreement on the Conservation of Polar Bears, signed by Canada, Denmark (Greenland), Norway, the United States and Russia, to co-ordinated polar bear management internationally. But that agreement does not mention traditional knowledge, Nirlungayuk said.

Tagged: Arctic, News, Research

(Indo Asian News Service, 26 October 2011) -- London - Researchers think a Canadian ice shelf had broken up 1,400 years ago, long before industrialisation impacted the planet. A study of sedimentary material on the bottom of Disraeli Fjord in Canada turned up proof of what the team from Universite Laval in Canada described as a major fracturing event 1,400 years ago. They believe at least an ice shelf, Ward Hunt north of Ellesmere Island, Nunavut, Canada, the largest remaining ice shelf in the Arctic at 170 square miles, broke up and then re-froze 800 years ago, the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports.

Ice shelves are thick ice crusts which have been pushed out to sea by the pressure from glaciers. They act as dams in fjords and result in sediment building up at the boundary between fresh water from the ice and salt water from the ocean, according to the Daily Mail. Researchers used carbon dating and other techniques to examine the sediment and were able to create a timeline of events.

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

(Daniel Cressey/Nature News, Nature 478, 174-177 (2011), doi:10.1038/478174a, 12 October 2011) -- Last month, US researchers took a 4,000-tonne gamble when they steered the Marcus G. Langseth through the Bering Strait and into the Arctic Ocean. The 72-metre research vessel was not built to plow through ice, so it had never ventured that far poleward before. But the rules are changing quickly in the new north. Managers at the US National Science Foundation (NSF), which owns the ship, decided to send the Langseth into the Arctic after reviewing satellite images that showed that the intended survey area in the Chukchi Sea had been largely clear of ice for four of the past five summers. ...

Governments keen to access this wealth are stepping up their activities in the area as a prelude to claiming rights to resources in vast swathes of territory under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). ... By some accounts, all this bluster points to a new cold war that could hamper scientists working in the Arctic. But geologists, oceanographers and others who have been conducting research in the region generally see more cooperation than competition.

"What you read in the media is geopolitical conflict," says Hajo Eicken, a sea-ice researcher at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. "What we see is quite the contrary. In many cases, you can do Arctic research only if you have good international collaboration in place." For researchers, a bigger problem is securing ship time. With the flurry of interest in the Arctic, scientists must compete with drilling companies and others for time on ships designed to operate in the region, which are in short supply. That is how Coakley and his colleagues ended up testing the Langseth in the Chukchi Sea. ... Commercial concerns are driving much of the activity in the Arctic Ocean, with oil companies, in particular, jockeying for position. ... At the same time, tourist ships are increasingly plying the waters off the west coast of Greenland. ... The north has become a popular destination.

Tagged: Arctic, News, Research

(Liza Piper, "Environmental health in the North: The example of nutrition"/Northern Canada Workshop at Network in Canadian History and Environment, 13 October 2011) -- For several years now, I have been researching and writing about the relationships between health and environmental change in the North over the past 150 years. When I initiated this project, it was enormous in scope, reaching from the late-eighteenth century right up to the present. I came at the topic from the perspective of Alfred Crosby’s seminal work on ecological imperialism. Specifically, I wished to explore the role that disease organisms played in facilitating the imposition of colonial control over the lands and people who would eventually make up Canada’s three northern territories (the Yukon, the Northwest Territories, and Nunavut).

Euro-Canadian germs worked as assistant colonizers in a process of social and environmental change that was its most intense from the late-nineteenth century into the late-twentieth century, and culminated in moments of crisis across the North in this period. These moments of crisis were signalled by epidemic outbreaks (such as a 1928 influenza epidemic in the Mackenzie Valley and a 1949 poliomyelitis outbreak in Chesterfield Inlet) and episodes of starvation (including the well-known famine in the Keewatin in the 1950s). These crises, in turn, shaped the emerging colonial relationships binding camps with communities, north and south, and defining northern society and economy in the twentieth century. Thus it was the responses to ill-health and ecological change that shaped much of the colonial apparatus of the Canadian state in the North. ...

The health of northern environments and the health of northern people were closely connected. Northern lands and waters were transformed in the twentieth century: as a result of increased hunting, trapping, and fishing (to the point of over-harvesting of game animals, fur-bearers, fowl, and fish species); as part of new industrial developments; and through the emergence of new commercial and social geographies (new transport routes, new populations centres, and so forth). So, too, northern diets changed.

... as my essay demonstrates, by the latter half of the twentieth century, the Canadian state came to use nutrition and nutritional science as the means by which to understand and to attempt to manage changing relationships between (predominantly Aboriginal) northerners and their environments. That is, diet became a tool of colonization and “nutrition” a means for colonizers to deal with the impacts they were having in the North.

This item is the thirteenth in a series of posts on the environmental history of northern Canada.

Tagged: Arctic, News, Research

(CBC News, 12 October 2011) -- Nunavut celebrated the opening of a state-of-the-art research centre. The Nunavut Research Centre in Iqaluit has been in operation since February, but on Wednesday, dignitaries, researchers and other invited guests were on hand for a special ceremony. "There is a pressing need for cutting-edge research combined with traditional knowledge in the North, administered by Northerners and more and more conducted by Northerners," said Nunavut premier Eva Aariak.

The 10,000 square foot building is home to research labs, classrooms and offices. It's also home to the environmental technology program at Nunavut's Arctic College. Aariak says having Inuit involved in scientific research will ensure traditional knowledge is passed on to future generations. Most of the money for the facility has come from the federal government. Nunavut MP Leona Aglukkaq was also on hand for the official opening.

Tagged: Arctic, News, Research infrastructure

(Finnish Meteorological Institute press release via Science Daily, 6 October 2011) -- The Finnish Meteorological Institute has developed a new, globally unique method for estimating surface albedo in the Arctic sea area solely on the basis of microwave data. Its advantage over conventional optical methods is that neither clouds nor darkness interfere with measurements.

The Finnish Meteorological Institute has developed a unique method for estimating surface albedo in the Arctic sea area. The method helps determine the amounts of solar radiation reflected from the Arctic sea area, information which is very important for climate change research. Albedo describes the ability of Earth's surface to reflect incoming radiation, and it is therefore associated with Earth's energy balance. Estimates of albedo affect the accuracy of model calculations pertaining to climate change, but they are also a good indicator of the change that has already taken place.

The surface albedo of Arctic regions is particularly important with respect to climate change, because changes in the extent of the ice cover in polar regions are crucial for albedo values. The albedo of the Arctic sea area is still relatively poorly known, but it has a major impact on climate model calculations. With global warming, the melting of sea ice reduces albedo values in the Arctic region. This means that more energy is absorbed in the region and more ice will melt. In other words, a decreasing albedo value will lead to climate feedback diminishing the albedo value further.

Tagged: Arctic, News, Research

CBC News, 2 October 2011) -- Unusual winter weather in the atmosphere high above the Earth's surface caused an "unprecedented" loss of protective ozone over the Arctic this year, scientists say. The ozone layer in the stratosphere, located about 15 to 35 kilometres above the Earth's surface, protects the Earth from the sun's ultraviolet rays and harmful effects such as skin cancer.

While an ozone hole has formed in the stratosphere over the Antarctic each spring since the mid 1980s, a paper published in Nature on Sunday marks the first time scientists have reported a comparable loss over the Arctic. "We've seen something unprecedented," said Kaley Walker, a University of Toronto atmospheric scientists who was part of the international team that conducted the study.

"The amount of depletion and how little ozone there was over certain altitudes is something we haven't seen before." The team concluded that the huge amount of ozone loss was linked to a period of extreme cold in the stratosphere that lasted 30 days longer this year than in any previously studied Arctic winter.

Tagged: Arctic, Polar research: Reports and findings

(University of Washington press release, 22 September 2011) -- Relatively accurate predictions for the extent of Arctic sea ice in a given summer can be made by assessing conditions the previous autumn, but forecasting conditions more than five years into the future depend on understanding the impact of climate trends on the ice pack, new research shows. Current conditions form an important starting point that governs how the ice responds to weather in the course of a few years, University of Washington-led research shows. But eventually climate trends overtake that starting point as the primary influence on the overall predictability of sea ice conditions.

"The Arctic is one of the places where conditions are changing the fastest of any climate system in the world," said Edward Blanchard-Wrigglesworth, a UW doctoral student in atmospheric sciences. "Current trends are so strong that it takes five years to establish a new mean." Blanchard-Wrigglesworth is lead author of a paper explaining the research published Wednesday (Sept. 21) in Geophysical Research Letters. Co-authors are Cecilia Bitz, a UW atmospheric sciences professor, and Marika Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado.

Research from the National Snow and Ice Data Center indicates the low point of this summer's Arctic sea ice cover was 36 percent less than the average minimum from 1979 through 2000, and was just a fraction above the record low in 2007. In the new study, the scientists used the Community Climate System Model version 4, one of only a few models that have successfully simulated the rate of Arctic sea ice decline that has occurred so far. They found that measurements of ice thickness and area in September could provide a good gauge for what the ice expanse would be like at its low ebb the following summer, July through September.

Such predictions are important for shipping – knowing whether the Northeast and Northwest passages might be ice-free in summer, for example – or for natural resource interests such as oil exploration. They also are important for native populations who depend on the sea ice for their livelihoods and to conservationists trying to preserve species such as polar bears.

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

(Networks of Centres of Excellence of Canada press release, 15 September 2011) -- Québec City, Quebec, September 15, 2011—The Honourable Christian Paradis, Minister of Industry and Minister of State (Agriculture), today announced an additional $67.3 million in funding to ArcticNet—the largest funding renewal for the Networks of Centres of Excellence (NCE) program to date. The mission of this world-leading network is to help adapt the coastal Canadian Arctic to climate change and modernization. ArcticNet received its first federal grant in 2003 for almost $46 million. ...

ArcticNet, an independent not-for-profit organization housed at the Université Laval in Quebec City, will receive the funding over a seven-year period. It was renewed because it met the threshold of excellence after rigorous evaluation of its scientific accomplishments, future research goals, and training and knowledge-transfer activities. ...

The NCE program is managed jointly by the three federal granting agencies—Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)—in partnership with Industry Canada.

Tagged: Arctic, News, Research infrastructure

(AFP Relax via Yahoo! OMG! Philippines, 12 September 2011) -- The area covered by Arctic sea ice reached its lowest point this week since the start of satellite observations in 1972, German researchers announced on Saturday. "On September 8, the extent of the Arctic sea ice was 4.240 million square kilometres (1.637 million square miles).

"This is a new historic minimum," said Georg Heygster, head of the Physical Analysis of Remote Sensing Images unit at the University of Bremen's Institute of Environmental Physics. The new mark is about half-a-percent under his team's measurements of the previous record, which occurred on September 16, 2007, he said.

According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), the record set on that date was 4.1 million sq km (1.6 sq mi). The discrepancy, Heygster explained by phone, was due to slightly different data sets and algorithms. "But the results are internally consistent in both cases," he said, adding that he expected the NSIDC to come to the same conclusion in the coming days. Arctic ice cover plays a critical role in regulating Earth's climate by reflecting sunlight and keeping the polar region cool.

Tagged: Arctic, News, Research

(Cardiff University press release via Physorg.com, 8 September 2011) -- An international team of scientists, led by Dr Stephen Barker of Cardiff University, has produced a prediction of what climate records from Greenland might look like over the last 800,000 years. Drill cores taken from Greenland's vast ice sheets provided the first clue that Earth's climate is capable of very rapid transitions and have led to vigorous scientific investigation into the possible causes of abrupt climate change.

Such evidence comes from the accumulation of layers of ancient snow, which compact to form the ice-sheets we see today. Each layer of ice can reveal past temperatures and even evidence for the timing and magnitude of distant storms or volcanic eruptions. By drilling cores in the ice scientists have reconstructed an incredible record of past climates. Until now such temperature records from Greenland have covered only the last 100,000 years or so. The team's reconstruction is based on the much longer ice core temperature record retrieved from Antarctica and uses a mathematical formulation to extend the Greenland record beyond its current limit.

Dr Barker, Cardiff School of Earth and Ocean Sciences said: "Our approach is based on an earlier suggestion that the record of Antarctic temperature variability could be derived from the Greenland record. "However, we turned this idea on its head to derive a much longer record for Greenland using the available records from Antarctica."

The research published in the journal Science demonstrates that abrupt climate change has been a systemic feature of Earth's climate for hundreds of thousands of years and may play an active role in longer term climate variability through its influence on ice age terminations.

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

(Blue Lagoon Productions for National Geographic News, 26 August 2011) -- Hear the views of three young people with the perspective of indigenous nations — their hopes and aspirations to make a contribution to a world changing by a warming climate and the consequent economic development of the northernmost part of the planet.

They were interviewed at the Seventh International Congress of Arctic Social Sciences (ICASS VII), held recently in Iceland.

Organized by the International Arctic Social Sciences Association (IASSA), ICASS VII was attended by more than 400 delegates, who between them presented some 300 papers and joined discussions in dozens of workshops. Watch our video interview with IASSA President Joan Nymand Larsen, discussing the highlights of ICASS VII. Read our entire coverage of ICASS VII.

&0147;... It’s extremely important for natives to have input into the scientific process, particularly if you’re looking at sustainability and climate change. If you’re looking at the northern region, they’re the main audience, the main people who will be affected. They are the ones who experience it first-hand, more quickly than everybody else. If you don’t include them in the science, you also lose a large amount of valuable knowledge they have to share. They’re the ones intimately connected to the environment around them, and they’re the ones connected to the changing political scene even. And if you want to be able to take that science from a text book to something that’s actually usable and influential for the community, you have to develop an effective communication network to be able to take it from knowledge to action.&0148; &0150; Julie Potter, Cherokee Nation, Eastern Band. Berea College, Kentucky. NSF summer intern

Tagged: Arctic, Public events and conferences, Research conduct and ethics

(CP via Winnipeg Free Press, 24 August 2011) -- CHURCHILL, Man. - An Arctic research station on Hudson Bay has marked the unveiling of its new facility in one of the busiest polar bear habitats by naming the recipient of one of Canada's largest research prizes.

Serge Payette, a plant ecologist at Laval University in Quebec, won the $50,000 Weston family prize in northern research. "It's a testimony to the work I've done over the last decades, thanks to the students I've trained," said Payette, who's been working in the Arctic for 40 years. The award's announcement gave further profile to the opening of the new station in Churchill, Man. It's one of four Arctic research centres given $11 million each by Ottawa in 2009 for refit and refurbishment. The money has taken the station from the era of punch cards and slide rules to the age of the Internet, said Mike Goodyear, director of the Churchill Northern Studies Centre.

The centre sits 23 kilometres east of Churchill and next to Wapusk National Park, which protects the inland denning area of a major polar bear population. In the old building — built 50 years ago by the military — snow blew through cracks in the windows. The roof leaked. The old lab didn't have proper heat. Not any more. "It's a brand-new building," Goodyear said proudly. New labs are clean and have separate wet and dry areas providing space for finicky technical analysis. "It'll allow a higher level of sophisticated research," said Goodyear. "In the past, for a lot of soil samples, there was only so much processing that could be done in Churchill and the rest would have to be sent back down to wherever. With a proper wet lab, there's more of that kind of work that can be done in Churchill. "It benefits the researchers because it provides a bit more instant feedback on what they're doing." Accommodations for scientists and the public who visit on educational vacations have also improved. "(The old building) was tight and uncomfortable," said Goodyear. "It wears on you. "The new building smooths that out."

Payette agrees field stations such as Churchill are essential to northern science. "It is of the utmost importance," he said. "If you want to have a good idea of the diversity of the North, you must go into the field. "This is a superb building."

Tagged: Arctic, News, Research infrastructure

(CP via Global Edmonton, 23 August 2011) -- RESOLUTE, Nunavut - Among the victims of the deadly weekend jet crash that Prime Minister Stephen Harper paid tribute to Tuesday was a federal scientist with a passion for Arctic research. Harper was supposed to have toured a shiny, new, research facility in Resolute Bay, but his visit was abbreviated due to Saturday's horrific crash that killed 12 people — including Winnipeg's Martin Bergman, the senior government researcher who was to have guided Harper on his science tour.

"Marty Bergman spent his life in pursuit of sharing the importance and relevance of Arctic through science," Harper said in a release before his arrival in this High Arctic hamlet. "During his impressive career in the government — most recently as director of the Polar Continental Shelf Program with Natural Resources — he worked tirelessly to support researchers in the country's vast and remote North and has been a leader in rejuvenating Canada's Arctic research infrastructure." That scientific rejuvenation is the subject of hot debate within Canada's tight-knit Arctic research community, with opinions diverging wildly on the focus and direction of the Harper government. Bergman's loss is just another blow to a difficult research environment that one observer notes has always been "boom and bust."

But where Canada's North is in that cycle these days depends who you ask. The Canadian Press has learned that federal funding for one of the crown jewels of Canada's Arctic research network was quietly extended last year with a commitment of $66 million. The seven-year extension of ArcticNet — to 2018 — has yet to be formally announced by a Conservative government that has made all things Northern an integral part of its political messaging. "That decision was made almost a year ago and it sure would be nice to have a formal announcement, but that's huge," said David Hik, the president of the International Arctic Science Committee and a member of the Canadian Polar Commission. ... So while there are dollars in the Arctic air, opinion from Canada's northern research community about the Conservative government and its northern strategy remains conflicted.

"The view that I have is rather positive at this time. Compared to the '80s and '90s, the present situation is excellent," said Louis Fortier, a Laval University biologist and longtime Arctic researcher who serves as scientific director for ArcticNet. Still, Fortier says Canada is doing only "25 to 30 per cent" of what it should in the Arctic compared with countries such as the United States, Denmark or Norway. "This government has the Arctic as a major focus on its agenda — maybe not for the good reasons. For them it's essentially the economy and sovereignty. Climate change is rather low on their priority. But in the end it's the same thing. "The money is there and you can do the research that will look at those big questions of what's going to happen in the Arctic."

Tagged: Arctic, News

(Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres press release via EurekAlert, 23 August 2011) -- Bremerhaven/North Pole, 22 August 2011. You can't get any "higher": on 22 August 2011 at exactly 9.42 a.m. the research icebreaker Polarstern of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association reaches the North Pole. The aim of he current expedition is to document changes in the far north. Thus, the researchers on board are conducting an extensive investigation programme in the water, ice and air at the northernmost point on the Earth. The little sea ice cover makes the route via the pole to the investigation area in the Canadian Arctic possible. ...

All 55 scientists and technicians from six countries on board the Polarstern have a common goal: studying the changes in the Arctic. This is also reflected in the name of the expedition "TransArc – Trans-Arctic survey of the Arctic Ocean in transition". The researchers have been investigating their questions jointly with the 43 crew members since the Polarstern left the port of Tromsø (Norway) on 5 August. The first ice floes appeared on 8 August. Since 9 August the Polarstern has been sailing through dense pack ice on the route along 60° East in temperatures of around 0° C. At first it was predominantly one-year-old sea ice, now older and consequently thicker ice floes appear.

"From a scientific point of view the North Pole is not more interesting than other places in the Arctic," reports Prof. Ursula Schauer from on board the Polarstern. The oceanographer at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association is the chief scientist of the expedition. "The expected changes are rather minor here. However, the northern part of the Canadian sector of the Arctic still numbers among the least researched regions on the globe because of the dense pack ice." ...

The Polarstern is at the North Pole for the third time in its history. On 7 September 1991 it was one of the first two conventionally driven ships to sail there, along with the Swedish research icebreaker Oden. Almost exactly ten years later, on 6 September 2001, it carried out a joint expedition at the North Pole together with the American research icebreaker Healy.

Tagged: Arctic, News, Research

(National Science Foundation press release, 23 August 2011) -- If you'd like to cool off fast in hot summer weather, take a dip in a newly discovered ocean current called the North Icelandic Jet (NIJ). You'd need to be far, far below the sea's surface near Iceland, however, to reach it. Scientists have confirmed the presence of the NIJ, a deep-ocean circulation system off Iceland. It could significantly influence the ocean's response to climate change.

The NIJ contributes to a key component of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), critically important for regulating Earth's climate. As part of the planet's reciprocal relationship between ocean circulation and climate, the AMOC transports warm surface water to high latitudes where the water warms the air, then cools, sinks and returns toward the equator as a deep flow. Crucial to this warm-to-cold oceanographic choreography is the Denmark Strait Overflow Water (DSOW), the largest of the deep, overflow plumes that feed the lower limb of the AMOC and return the dense water south through gaps in the Greenland-Scotland Ridge.

For years it has been thought that the primary source of the Denmark Overflow was a current adjacent to Greenland known as the East Greenland Current. However, this view was recently called into question by two oceanographers from Iceland who discovered a deep current flowing southward along the continental slope of Iceland. They named the current the North Icelandic Jet and hypothesized that it formed a significant part of the overflow water. Now, in a paper published in the August 21st online issue of the journal Nature Geoscience, the team of researchers — including the two Icelanders who discovered the current — has confirmed that the Icelandic Jet is not only a major contributor to the DSOW but "is the primary source of the densest overflow water." "We present the first comprehensive measurements of the NIJ," said Robert Pickart of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, one of the co-authors of the paper.

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

(Randy Boswell/Postmedia News via Nunatsiaq News, 23 August 2011) -- A Parks Canada-led team of researchers is trying — again — to unravel the ultimate Arctic mystery: the whereabouts of the lost ships of the ill-fated Franklin Expedition.

The experts are armed with everything from historical Inuit testimony and the scrawled writings of 19th-century explorers to state-of-the art seabed scanners and the latest computer simulations of ice movement through the Arctic Archipelago.

And while underwater archeologist Ryan Harris and his colleagues from a host of federal and Nunavut government agencies are optimistic that this could be the year for a worldshaking discovery, they know they’re not the first to harbour that hope.

Still, the veteran Parks Canada diver and marine historian is excited about fresh data being supplied by Canadian Ice Service scientists that should help the search team retrace what happened to the stranded Franklin ships more than a century and a half ago — and to help pinpoint where they might lie on the bottom of the Arctic Ocean.

Tagged: Arctic, News, Research

(Mike De Souza/Postmedia News, 17 August 2011) -- OTTAWA - On the eve of what has become an annual end-of-summer trek up North for Prime Minister Stephen Harper, senior Canadian scientists are urging him to balance his strategy for the region. While many believe Harper's government is doing some of the right things to support development in the North, rapidly undergoing a transformation because of global warming, they say a lot of it is for the wrong reasons.

"It's a matter of leadership," said Louis Fortier, the scientific director of ArcticNet, an academic network hosted at Université Laval in Quebec City. "I think I would tell this government that the scientific community in general is there to support Canada's northern strategy, but we have to act faster to take leadership, to take action, not to always wait for the others to make the first move, but to go ahead and do it."

Fortier and other top Canadian scientists contacted by Postmedia News praised the federal government for paying attention to the Arctic for the first time since the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s when John Diefenbaker was prime minister. But Fortier noted some recent examples indicate it must do more, such as criticism from France's ambassador for the polar regions, Michel Rocard, who suggested Canada was not keeping up with Russia in terms of Arctic shipping capacity. ...

Tagged: Arctic, News

(AP via FoxNews, 8 August 2011) -- ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Scientists have identified an orange-colored gunk that appeared along the shore of a remote Alaska village as millions of microscopic eggs. But the mystery isn't quite solved. Officials with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said Monday they don't know what species the eggs are -- or if they are toxic. They have sent samples to a laboratory on the East Coast for further analysis.

The neon orange goo showed up last week on the surface of the water in Kivalina, an Inupiat Eskimo community located at the tip of an 8-mile (12.8-kilometer) barrier reef on Alaska's northwest coast. Residents live largely off the land, and many are worried about the effect on the local wildlife and plants from a substance never seen there before. ... When the material bunched up in the lagoon, it created 10 foot-by-100 foot swaths of glimmering orange. "When the wind came in, it narrowed them to a few feet wide. The color was a bright neon orange," said Frances Douglas, a member of the city council. "It pretty much covered the south end of the lagoon in streaks," she said of the attraction, which drew many residents. "Pretty much, everybody was baffled," she said.

Tagged: Arctic, News, Research

(Dechinta students and faculty via Northern Clipper, 15 July 2011) -- During their recent tour of Canada, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge visited Blachford Lake Lodge on the traditional and unceded territory of the Yellowknives Dene First Nation. The July 5 stopover began with demonstrations by the 1st Canadian Rangers Patrol Group, composed mainly of Inuit members. From there, the royals began a tour of Dechinta Bush University Centre for Research and Learning. Dechinta is a post-secondary education initiative providing Indigenous and non-Indigenous students with much-needed opportunities to take university-accredited courses developed in the North, led by Northern experts, and focused on the land as the primary teacher. But more than that, Dechinta provides an educational setting committed to decolonization and Indigenous self-determination. At Dechinta, one doesn't just learn about decolonization, Dechinta is a practice of decolonization.

The royal visit began with a lesson in several Dene languages. Dechinta then engaged the couple in Dene practices including preparation of caribou meat, smoking fish, use of medicinal plants, moosehide tanning, and beading. These practices were portrayed by the media as arts and crafts. What the coverage didn't communicate is that Dechinta participants explained to the royal couple how these activities play a key role in learning about, and engaging in, decolonization. As colonialism has displaced Indigenous peoples from their land, these activities help reconstitute students political, social and economic relations to that land. ...

Dechinta believes land-based education can also provide a site for self determination. The hope was that the message being advocated by Dechinta would shine during the royal visit and it wouldn't collapse practices of Indigenous governance and self determination into a display of 'arts and crafts'. However, once the event was over and media reports hit the airwaves, it became apparent this wasn't the case.

While this article may not correct the misinterpretation of the event propagated by the media, at least some record will exist of its true intent.

Dechinta Bush University Centre for Research and Learning is a northern-led initiative to deliver land-based, university credited educational experiences. Led by experts, elders, professors and northern leaders, Dechinta seeks to engage northern and southern youth in transformative curricula based on the cutting-edge needs of Canada's North. To learn more please click here.

Tagged: Arctic, Education and outreach, History, News, NorthernU

(The Local, 15 July 2011) --The wild and mysterious polar regions - planet Earth's last relatively unexplored areas - have long struck a cord with the adventurous side within many of us. These ice-covered regions, shrouded in darkness for much of the year, are blessed with unique environments boasting both flora and fauna unknown to the rest of the planet. Extreme, yet delicate, this polar environment is also an area of great interest for science. One who has long been drawn to these intriguing areas is Professor Martin Jakobsson of Stockholm University, who received his PhD in 2000 and has emerged as one of the world's leading polar researchers. ... As Professor of Marine Geology and Geophysics, Jakobsson has devoted himself to research within glacial history and paleoceanography, and has worked a great deal in the field of "bathymetry’" – the measurement of the underwater depth of lake or ocean floors. ... Renowned paleoceanographer Jan Backman's presence at Stockholm University was another key to Professor Jakobsson’s choice of specialization – as was the fact that paleoceanography provides vital understanding of climate change. "Paleoceanography studies how the sea has evolved, which can be connected with climate research over a longer time span," he explained.

Polar science as a whole is an important area which helps us to understand both climate change and our planet's eco-systems better. "In the polar regions there are many sensitive environments that are convenient to study for climate research," says Martin Jakobsson. The uniquely delicate environments, whose balance is easily tipped by the slightest disturbance, make the polar regions exceptionally susceptible to climate change – and exceptionally useful for scientists. The effects are much more rapidly visible on the poles, which according to recent figures are warming twice as fast as elsewhere. Professor Martin Jakobsson is in good company at Stockholm University, which is today one of the world's leading institutions for polar research. The Swedish Research Council recently classed as many as three current polar projects at the university as "outstanding", meaning that they hold world-leading standards. Their work has had broad international media coverage. But the accolades are not just domestic; Stockholm University's outstanding researchers in this field are receiving international recognition too. Perhaps most significant was the award of this year's International Arctic Science Committee (IASC) medal – a kind of frozen Fields Medal – for Professor Jakobsson’s work. Explaining its decision, the IASC jury wrote, "Jakobsson represents a new generation of Arctic scientist for which multinational and cross-disciplinary science comes naturally."

Tagged: Arctic, Awards, etc., News, Research

(Terra Daily, 15 July 2011) -- Polar bears' unique characteristics allow them to survive in one of the most extreme environments on Earth, but that survival is now threatened as rising temperatures and melting ice reshape the Arctic landscape. Now it appears that the stress of climate change, occurring both long ago and today, may be responsible for surprising twists in the bears' history and future as well.

According to DNA evidence reported in the July 7th Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, polar bears and brown bears have mated successfully many times in the last 100,000 years. As a result of some of those pairings, the polar bears of today also have unexpected Irish roots.

"We found that brown bears and polar bears, which are hybridizing today in the wild, have been hybridizing opportunistically throughout the last 100,000 years and probably longer," said Beth Shapiro of The Pennsylvania State University, noting recent sightings of hybrid adults in Canada. "Generally, this seems to happen when climate changes force the bears to move into each others' habitat. When they come into contact, there seems to be little barrier to them mating."

The researchers used patterns in mitochondrial DNA sequence to trace the bears' evolutionary history. Mitochondria are cellular components with their own DNA and are passed on from mother to child. By extracting and sequencing those mitochondrial genomes from fossils collected from all over the world, the researchers were able to observe how the bears' maternal lineages have shifted in space and over time. They then correlated those patterns with changes in the environment and in the bears' habitats.

"This approach provides a means to go back in time and directly measure the movement of species in response to past climate change," said study author Daniel Bradley of Trinity College Dublin. The study shows that the modern polar bears' maternal line (from female ancestor to their descendants of either sex) descends from a recent hybridization with an extinct population of brown bears that lived in the vicinity of modern-day Britain and Ireland, not from bears living off the coast of Alaska as many believed. That hybridization event most likely occurred just prior to or during the last ice age, they report.

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

(RIA Novosti) -- MOSCOW - Members of the expedition on the delimitation of the Russian Arctic shelf on the research vessel Akademik Fyodorov have begun seismic studies in the area north of Franz Josef Land, a representative of the Rosatom Flot (Russian Atomic Fleet) company Ekaterina Ananyeva said. The nuclear-powered icebreaker Rossiya left the port of Murmansk earlier this month to accompany the Akademik Fyodorov on a second mission to determine the boundaries of Russia's continental shelf in the Arctic. "The expedition began its research on July 9," Ananyeva said.

Russia is planning to file a proposal to a UN Commission in 2012 to expand its Arctic shelf borders, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov said earlier in July. Russia is still in a dispute with Canada over the Lomonosov Ridge, with both countries trying to persuade a UN commission that it is an extension of its own continental shelf. The sides have agreed that scientific evidence should resolve the dispute. The main goal of the two-month-long expedition is to measure the thickness of the bottom silt along the Lomonosov Ridge as part of the evidence that supports Russia's territorial claim. The settlement of the dispute in Russia's favor will give the country the right to develop vast energy resources on the Arctic shelf. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin reiterated last week that Russia will not backtrack on its territorial claims on the underwater Lomonosov and Mendeleev ridges in the Arctic region and will protect its geopolitical interests "firmly and consistently."

Tagged: Arctic, News, Research

(University of Washington press release via Futurity.org, 27 June 2011) -- The caribou population has been declining in the region for several decades causing speculation that the entire population could be gone in 70 years. Further, in the area of the petroleum-rich Athabasca Oil Sands in the northern part of the Canadian province, some researchers predict they could disappear in as little as 30 years. While the drop in caribou in recent decades is certain, populations have held relatively steady in the last four years, says Samuel Wasser, conservation biologist at the University of Washington. In a new study, published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, Wasser calls for controlling the impact of human activities before resorting to more drastic actions such as removing wolves from the area. ...

Scat samples from caribou, moose, and wolves, well preserved because of sub-freezing temperatures, were collected in the winters of 2006, 2007, and 2009. In 2009, four teams of highly trained scat-detection dogs led to the recovery of 2,000 samples of caribou, moose, and wolf scat in 10 weeks. In examining the samples, researchers determined habitat preferences for each species, their abundance, the type and quality of food consumed, and hormone levels that could indicate whether the animals were under psychological or nutritional stress, or both.

Deer were found to make up 80 percent of wolves’ diet, with caribou and moose each accounting for about 10 percent. Moose favored habitat associated with food and didn’t seem particularly concerned about people. The result was that their scat had low levels of stress hormones and high levels of nutrition hormones. But caribou proved to be much more skittish. They chose open, flat areas where, presumably, they could see and hear predators and escape. That also made it easier for them to see and hear humans on the landscape. Their scat reflected high stress and low nutrition in areas nearer roads when humans were most active. It turned out that wolves mostly favored areas inhabited by their favorite food source, deer, which also is habitat with few caribou.

Removing wolves could actually have unintentional consequences, Wasser says, because with a much-reduced wolf population, the number of deer would probably increase rapidly. The deer could alter the habitat and perhaps reduce the caribou food supply. Deer also carry multiple diseases that could jump to the caribou population. Until there is evidence to the contrary, changing human activity patterns is safer, he says.

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

(American Journal of Botany press release, 17 May 2011) -- With an increasingly warmer climate, there is a trend for springs to arrive earlier and summers to be hotter. Since spring and summer are the prime growing seasons for plants -- when flowers bloom and trees increase in girth and height -- do these climate changes mean greater seasonal growth for plants? This is a critical question for forest management, especially in the boreal region -- an area particularly sensitive to the effects of climate change.

Dr. Jian-Guo Huang, currently a post-doc at the University of Alberta, and colleagues from the University of Quebec at Montreal were interested in assessing whether a potentially extended growing season affects stem xylem formation and growth in black spruce (Picea mariana) in Western Quebec, Canada. They published their findings in the May issue of the American Journal of Botany. ... By taking microcore samples from black spruce trees at three different latitudes ranging from 47.5o to 50oN in Western Quebec throughout the growing season (May-September) in 2005 and 2006, Huang and colleagues were able to determine when xylem cell production began and ended, as well as the pattern of xylem cell growth. They then compared these data to soil and air temperature and precipitation data gathered from local climate stations. ...

When the authors examined the pattern of xylem cell initiation, they found an interesting correlation with patterns in air temperatures in the two years. Across all three sites, xylem cell production in black spruce trees started earlier in 2006 than in 2005, corresponding with an earlier spring (and warmer May temperatures) in 2006 -- indicating a positive relationship between temperature and onset of xylem production. ... "Our study implies that despite the expected occurrence of earlier phenological development due to early spring climate warming, boreal trees like Picea mariana might not be producing wider rings if cold temperatures occur later in the growing season in June to August," Huang said. "These results may challenge the view that boreal trees could be benefiting from spring warming to enhance growth." Thus, not only is the timing of the onset of spring important, but the amplitude of summer warming temperatures also plays a role in wood production.

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

(Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research press release via redOrbit, 16 May 2011) -- The research aircraft Polar 5 of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association returned to Bremerhaven from a six-week expedition in the high Arctic on May 6. Joint flights with aircraft of the European and American space agencies (ESA and NASA) were a novelty in sea ice research. Simultaneous measurements with a large number of sensors on three planes underneath the CryoSat-2 satellite led to unique data records. Furthermore, the international team composed of 25 scientists and engineers collected data on trace gases, aerosols and meteorological parameters that will be evaluated at the research institutes involved in the coming months.

The route of the Polar 5 of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association took it from Barrow (Alaska) via Inuvik, Resolute Bay, Eureka, Alert (all in northern Canada) and Station Nord (Greenland) all the way to Longyearbyen on Spitsbergen. These sites were the base stations for the measurement flights to the uninhabited Arctic areas. The total flight time, including measurements and travel time, came to 130 hours. Temperatures  below minus 30°C in some cases were a challenge for both team and material.

One of the key aspects of the expedition were large-scale sea ice thickness measurements in the inner Arctic, in which researchers of the Alfred Wegener Institute and the University of Alberta cooperated closely. For this purpose they used a four meter long electromagnetic ice thickness sensor, called EM Bird. The Polar 5 towed the sensor on an 80 meter long rope at a height of 15 meters above the ice surface for the surveys. A preliminary evaluation of the measurement results shows that one-year-old sea ice in the Beaufort Sea (north of Canada/Alaska) is about 20-30 centimeters thinner this year than in the two previous years. In 2009 the ice thickness was 1.7 meters on average, in 2010 1.6 meters and in 2011 around 1.4 meters. “I expect that this thin one-year-old sea ice will not survive the melting period in summer,” Dr. Stefan Hendricks assesses the situation. In several weeks his colleagues from the sea ice group at the Alfred Wegener Institute will present their model calculations for the sea ice minimum in 2011, which will also include the data now collected.

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

(AP via Washington Post, 5 April 2011) -- STOCKHOLM — Global mercury emissions could grow by 25 percent by 2020 if no action is taken to control them, posing a threat to polar bears, whales and seals and the Arctic communities who hunt those animals for food, an authoritative international study says.

The assessment by a scientific body set up by the eight Arctic rim countries also warns that climate change may worsen the problem, by releasing mercury stored for thousands of years in permafrost or promoting chemical processes that transform the substance into a more toxic form.

“It is of particular concern that mercury levels are continuing to rise in some Arctic species in large areas of the Arctic,” despite emissions reductions in nearby regions like Europe, North America and Russia, the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program, or AMAP, said.

Tagged: Arctic, Polar research: Reports and findings

(Aurora Research Institute, 28 April 2011) -- Please note that information on this page has been updated and is now available as a PDF document at http://www.nwtresearch.ca/licensing/guide-for-researchers.

Tagged: Arctic, News, Research conduct and ethics

(Fort Frances Times, 12 April 2011) -- New research suggests changes in the Arctic Ocean could affect the climate of coastal Europe. “Large regional changes could be in store if the ocean circulation changes,” said Laura de Stern of the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research. De Stern is the lead author of a major international study on the northern seas released last week. One of the report’s findings is that the Arctic Ocean holds a vast pool of relatively fresh water. Much of it comes from rivers such as Canada’s Mackenzie and Russia’s Lena. That pool—now larger than 7,500 cubic km—is contained in the Canada Basin off the coast of the Northwest Territories and Yukon by a pattern of wind circulation called the Beaufort Gyre. But the gyre changes in strength. When it weakens, the fresher water it has kept concentrated in the Arctic is released to filter into the North Atlantic.

“This is a natural phenomenon,” said contributor Mike Steele of the University of Washington. “[The gyre] tends to collect it in some years, and in other years the gyre will shrink and then it’ll sort of release the fresh water,” he explained. Recent data suggests climate change may be increasing the amount of fresh water pouring into the Arctic Ocean. A study by Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute released in March found the upper layers of the northern ocean already may be 20 percent less salty than they were in the 1990s. The data points to increasingly larger and fresher releases of water from the Arctic Ocean into the North Atlantic. “These Arctic outflow surges can significantly change the densities of marine surface waters in the extreme North Atlantic,” said de Stern.

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

(PhysOrg, 20 April 2011) -- Melting glaciers and ice caps on Canadian Arctic islands play a much greater role in sea level rise than scientists previously thought, according to a new study led by a University of Michigan researcher.

The 550,000-square-mile Canadian Arctic Archipelago contains some 30,000 islands. Between 2004 and 2009, the region lost the equivalent of three-quarters of the water in Lake Erie, the study found. Warmer-than-usual temperatures in those years caused a rapid increase in the melting of glacier ice and snow, said Alex Gardner, a research fellow in the Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences who led the project. The study is published online in Nature on April 20.

"This is a region that we previously didn't think was contributing much to sea level rise," Gardner said. "Now we realize that outside of Antarctica and Greenland, it was the largest contributor for the years 2007 through 2009. This area is highly sensitive and if temperatures continue to increase, we will see much more melting."

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

(Mike Dunham/Anchorage Daily News, 27 April 2011) -- Alaska has lost one of its most influential teachers and thinkers. Angayuqaq Oscar Kawagley died in Fairbanks on Sunday of renal cancer. He was 76. Over the course of a prolific career, he explored how the Yup'ik concepts he learned as a boy on the tundra could work in concert with western education and he became a pioneer in the field of indigenous knowledge, not just in Alaska but in the academic world at large.

Kawagley was born in Bethel to David Kawagley of Akiak and Amelia Oscar of Bethel on Nov. 8, 1934. His parents died when he was 2 years old, and he was raised by his grandmother, Matilda Oscar. Matilda Oscar spoke only Yup'ik and trained him in traditional Native life ways as he grew up in the fish camps and villages of the lower Kuskokwim region. At the same time she insisted that he learn the western ideas taught in the government schools. According to the obituary published in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, "Although this created conflicting values and caused confusion for him for many years, he sought to find ways in which his (Yup'ik) peoples' language and culture could be used in the classroom to meld the contemporary ways to the (Yup'ik) thought world."

Tagged: Arctic, History, News

(RIA Novosti, 26 April 2011) -- Russia will create a scientific center in Barentsburg in the Svalbard Archipelago, polar explorer parliament member Artur Chilingarov said on Tuesday. "A decision is being discussed on building a Russian research center on the base of the existing observatory," Chilingarov said.

"This will be in Barentsburg," he continued adding that the construction may begin next year. Svalbard belongs to Norway, however, the archipelago was established as a free economic and demilitarized zone. Chilingarov said that he met with Svalbard authorities to discuss the construction of the research center and they fully understand the need to comply with the agreement on the Russian presence on the archipelago.

Tagged: Arctic, News, Research, Research infrastructure

(NOAA press release, 18 April 2011) -- Six nations are participating in a study that looks at the potential role of black carbon, or soot, on the rapidly changing Arctic climate. NOAA is using two small unmanned aircraft the size of a large suitcase outfitted with sensors to sniff and sample the air.

The Arctic climate is changing faster than some scientists expected. A continuing decline in summer sea ice, warmer temperatures, changes in vegetation, and other indicators signal polar changes that affect the rest of the globe. Black carbon is contributing to this warming. Scientists say much of the black carbon in the Arctic comes from biomass and fossil fuel burning in North America and Eurasia.

“Carbon is dark in color and absorbs solar radiation, much like wearing a black shirt on a sunny day. If you want to be cooler, you would wear a light-colored shirt that would reflect the sun’s warmth,” said Tim Bates, a research chemist at NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) in Seattle and co-lead of the U.S. component of the study. “When black carbon covers snow and ice, the radiation is absorbed, much like that black shirt, instead of being reflected back into the atmosphere.”

Also participating in the Coordinated Investigation of Climate-Cryosphere Interactions (CICCI) project are scientists from Norway, Russia, Germany, Italy and China. The goal is to coordinate more than a dozen research activities so they are done concurrently providing, for the first time, a vertical profile of black carbon’s movement through the atmosphere, its deposition on snow and ice surfaces, and its affect on warming in the Arctic.

“We need to better understand the behavior of black carbon in the Arctic,” said Patricia Quinn, co-lead of the NOAA portion of the project and a research chemist at PMEL. “This coordinated study will give us a snapshot so we can see all of it at once.”

Tagged: Arctic, News, Research

(Stanford University press release via EurekAlert! 11 April 2011) -- Patience may be a virtue in a person, but in an infectious disease, it is insidious. Witness tuberculosis, which can lie dormant in a human host for decades before bursting forth into infection. TB's stealthy nature has made it difficult to decipher how it spreads, seriously hampering efforts to control it. The World Health Organization estimates that a third of the people on Earth are infected.

Now, a study led by Stanford scientists has provided new insights into the behavior of tuberculosis by tracing the travels of a particular strain of the disease that was unintentionally spread among the indigenous peoples of western Canada by French Canadian voyageurs during the fur trade era. Although the disease was probably brought into the native populations repeatedly from about 1710 to 1870, it didn't spark an epidemic until the fur trade had largely ended, more than 150 years from when it was first introduced.

"We found there was this widespread, low-level dispersal of tuberculosis that did not become obvious until environmental changes occurred that created conditions conducive to epidemics," said Caitlin Pepperell, an infectious diseases specialist at Stanford. The process, she said, resembles the way a smoldering fire can spread underground, through the roots of trees and brush, then burst into fire without warning. "Tuberculosis epidemics are the outcomes of a process that has effectively been occurring underground," she said – unlike smallpox, which quickly escalates into epidemics. "This helps explain why it has been so extraordinarily difficult to eradicate TB." The conditions that finally triggered epidemics in Canada in the late 1800s likely resulted from the relocation of native peoples onto reservations [sic], where health conditions were often abysmal.

The biggest factor, she said, was probably malnutrition. The buffalo, once a dietary mainstay of indigenous peoples on the prairie, had been virtually exterminated by then. Other principal food sources, such as other animals, wild plants and fish, were also severely depleted and attempts to provide famine relief fell woefully short. Housing was also of low quality, with too many people living in close quarters, often lacking adequate ventilation or protection against the elements. "With tuberculosis, even such simple things as having windows that open can actually make quite a large difference in terms of the risk of transmission," Pepperell said. "Any situation where there is poor ventilation, it is dark and it is crowded is perfect for transmitting TB." Pepperell, a physician and an instructor in the division of infectious diseases at Stanford's School of Medicine, is the lead author of a paper about the study published online by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week.

Tagged: Arctic, News, Research

(Queen's University press release, 6 April 2011) -- Queen's researchers have discovered that nanoparticles, which are now present in everything from socks to salad dressing and suntan lotion, may have irreparably damaging effects on soil systems and the environment. "Millions of tonnes of nanoparticles are now manufactured every year, including silver nanoparticles which are popular as antibacterial agents," says Virginia Walker, a professor in the Department of Biology. "We started to wonder what the impact of all these nanoparticles might be on the environment, particularly on soil."

The team acquired a sample of soil from the Arctic as part of their involvement in the International Polar Year initiative. The soil was sourced from a remote Arctic site as they felt that this soil stood the greatest chance of being uncontaminated by any nanoparticles.

"We hadn't thought we would see much of an impact, but instead our results indicate that silver nanoparticles can be classified as highly toxic to microbial communities. This is particularly concerning when you consider the vulnerability of the arctic ecosystem." ... The researchers first examined the indigenous microbe communities living in the uncontaminated soil samples before adding three different kinds of nanoparticles, including silver. The soil samples were then left for six months to see how the addition of the nanoparticles affected the microbe communities. What the researchers found was both remarkable and concerning. ...

These pioneering findings by Queen's researchers Niraj Kumar and Virginia Walker and Dowling College's Vishal Shah have been published today in the Journal of Hazardous Materials, the highest ranking journal in Civil Engineering.

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

(Arctic Council, 5 April 2011) -- Thirty scientists, managers and community experts met in Vancouver, Canada, to develop a technical report on what effects sea-ice reduction has on biodiversity in the Arctic. The Arctic Council Working Group on Conservation of Arctic Flora and Fauna (CAFF), organized and managed the workshop.

The workshop, which took place 22-23 March 2011, considered the following urgent issues: 

• An overview of sea ice ecosystems and the role of ice in regions where sea ice is integral
• The potential for wildlife and communities to adapt to a changing sea ice scenario
• Impacts of reduced sea ice on genetic diversity of species
• New species likely to establish as a result of reduction in sea ice
• Positive and negative effects of changes to species composition on other wildlife and people
• Priority actions that could be taken in support of sea ice-associated biodiversity
• Information gaps that require targeted research

Building on the workshop's results, the project will develop a technical report on the current status and trends of sea ice-associated biodiversity, including direct effects on marine species and indirect effects on terrestrial species. The report will be finalized during a second workshop to be held in Russia in autumn 2011.  Here, the accompanying conservation, scientific and policy recommendations will also be developed.

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

(Sarah Rogers/Nunatsiaq News, 27 March 2011) -- Most Nunavummiut live by the sea, and this means that in Nunavut, sea ice or “siku” plays a big role in travel, harvesting, recreation and culture. This is particularly true for about 100 Nunavut elders, who, working with Canadian researchers, helped create the first Siku atlas, a new online resource that documents traditional Inuit knowledge of sea ice.

The Siku atlas launched March 17 in three Nunavut communities and at Ottawa’s Carleton University, the project’s southern base. For the atlas, elders and researchers worked together over the course of nine years to gather stories, maps, terminology and lessons so people can explore and learn about sea ice through Inuit. Inuit elders will tell you that the atlas is a way to pass their knowledge onto their grandchildren. “I’ve been using [the sea ice] for the last 50 years,” says Igloolik elder David Irngaut, in a video posted on the Siku website. “The usage I’ve had for it and the uses I have today are pretty much the same in that I use it for harvesting marine mammals and then I still use it to get to places where I hunt which are non-marine.

“My little one[s], even though they are never going to be hunting there ... probably, seeing as how they don’t use fat anymore, or dogs. They probably won’t have the need to go down, but having the knowledge will help them, if at some point they have to use the moving ice.” Because youth no longer use the ice as much as their forebears did, Nunavut elders said they want to be sure that young hunters have the survival and navigational skills needed if their snowmobiles break down, or their GPS runs out of batteries.

The atlas is already being incorporated into curriculum in some Nunavut high schools.

Tagged: Arctic, News, Research

(Anna Mehler Paperny/Globe and Mail, 24 March 2011) -- A series of holes hand-drilled into Arctic ice in the middle of a snowstorm at -40 degrees could shed light on everything from northern resource extraction to polar sovereignty to determining weather patterns in Western Europe and the South Pacific. At least, that’s what a team of daredevil researchers is hoping. The group has set up camp 25 kilometres offshore from a landing strip in Isachsen, Nunavut, to spend weeks studying the effects of ice melt on global ocean currents during the Arctic's most punishing season. Their base consists of steel-and-nylon tents designed to maintain enough heat to keep equipment and humans warm amid a punishing spring squall and whiteout conditions.

“Because we’re there, intimately, on the sea ice, in spots that otherwise can’t be accessed, we’re potentially getting data that isn’t possible by any other means,” says Adrian McCallum, an Australian finishing his PhD at Cambridge’s Scott Polar Research Centre. Over the next several weeks, he’ll sledge from the North Pole to Greenland, drilling holes through sea ice as he goes, measuring everything from ice thickness to the temperature and salinity of the water. This expedition, now in its third year, is funded by Catlin Group – an insurer and underwriter that won’t disclose what it pays for the Arctic odyssey except to say the price tag runs well over $1-million (U.S.).

It’s a smart PR move: It puts the company’s name on a high-profile scientific expedition with global appeal. But when you’re in the risk-management business, Catlin Group spokesman Jim Burcke says, it pays to know how a melting pole is going to change shipping, weather and ocean currents globally. The work the company is backing is pricey and perilous, but researchers argue it is becoming increasingly imperative for anyone with a stake in what goes on up north. That would include Canada. But despite recent increases in funding, Canada still lags its polar neighbours when it comes to scientific research.

“In some ways we’re doing, probably, better than we have been,” says Greg Poelzer, director of the University of Saskatchewan’s International Centre for Northern Governance and Development. “But we aren’t where we need to be.” In 2005, Canada’s funding for Arctic research was about one-tenth that of the United States, which clocked in at $300-million for 2005-2006, says Louis Fortier, scientific director of Laval-based ArcticNet. It has since increased, but he still figures that Canadian researchers publish just over half the number of Arctic-related papers as their U.S. counterparts. Meanwhile, corporate interest in the North is ramping up – so much so that researchers have trouble getting increasingly sought-after spots on icebreakers. It’s not just fellow polar countries, either: Canadian researchers are vying with scientists from China and South Korea, who realize how important Arctic knowledge is to their own economic and strategic interests.

Tagged: Arctic, News, Research

(Mia Bennett/The Arctic: Foreign Policy Blogs, 29 March 2011) -- The U.S. Navy is conducting naval exercises in the Arctic as part of Ice Exercise 2011 (ICE-X 2011). The USS New Hampshire and the USS Connecticut are the two submarines participating in the exercises, which have been planned and are being overseen by the Arctic Submarine Laboratory located in San Diego, about as far away from the Arctic as one can get in the U.S!

Crews will practice navigating and surfacing the submarines in icy water. One thing sailors have to watch out for is ice keels, which are created when two icebergs smash into each other, piling downward into upside-down mountains of ice. This website has a good description of ice keels, along with the below illustration. A new subsurface communications system called DeepSiren, designed by Raytheon, is also being tested in the difficult conditions north of 60 degrees. According to Raytheon engineer Steve Moynahan, “heavy acoustic reverberation, changing surface and subsurface contours, and moving and cracking ice floes” make operating conditions different from anywhere else on earth.

Tagged: Arctic, News, Research