Postcards from the Arctic: Documenting Ice Loss in Canada’s Rocky Mountains By: Andrea Sparrow & Kerry Koepping Canada opened its borders to US citizens in late summer. While Covid-19 continues to make travel challenging, the Arctic Arts team jumped through all the hoops and headed to the mountains in Alberta and British Columbia to see how …
Postcards From the Arctic: Iceland 2021 By: Andrea Sparrow Our team’s travels to Iceland were a wonderful success! There have been a number of scientific papers recently about glacial ice loss in peri-arctic and high alpine regions around the world. Our intention was to see for ourselves how several of Iceland’s glaciers have changed over …
The Arctic is undergoing a significant transformation as a result of climate change. A new NASA-led study has revealed that the ice melt is flooding one of the region’s significant ocean currents with fresh water.
While climate records are being routinely broken, the cumulative impact of these changes could also cause fundamental parts of the Earth system to change dramatically and irreversibly.
Scientists with the University of Alaska Fairbanks, U.S. Geological Survey and other institutions have documented 56 beaver complexes that have been built since 1999 along rivers and creeks in Arctic northwestern Alaska.
As the autumn cold begins to bite in the Arctic tundra, the freezing ground releases a large and unexpected burst of methane into the air. The emissions, thought to be squeezed out by the growth of surface frost, match up with an atmospheric methane surge that had previously gone unexplained.
Capelin are described a “lynchpin” species because a healthy population helps other types of fish. Cod and turbot eat them directly, and without lots of capelin those fish will eat commercially valuable crab and shrimp instead. Scientists blame late spawning for the population drop.
New NASA-funded research has discovered that Arctic permafrost’s expected gradual thawing and the associated release of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere may actually be sped up by instances of a relatively little known process called abrupt thawing.
Shorebird populations have shrunk, on average, by an estimated 70% across North America since 1973, and the species that breed in the Arctic are among the hardest hit. Photo by Malkolm Boothroyd
Living in the harsh environments of the Arctic and Subarctic, populations of both reindeer and caribou—members of the Rangifer genus—naturally vary in number over decades. But the abundance of migratory reindeer and caribou has continuously declined since the mid-1990s, according to the 2018 Arctic Report Card.
Global climate change has the potential to influence Arctic bird populations in many ways, through effects acting in the Arctic itself as well as on migration routes or in wintering areas.
Could the future of the ocean depend on its smallest organisms? New studies show that increased CO2 in ocean water can disrupt the food chain for larger species that feed on them and potentially impact ocean currents.
As Greenland Minerals, an Australian company, begins the process of building a rare earth mineral mine in Southern Greenland, a new industry sets foot in the landscape of this part of the Arctic.
NSIDC- Arctic Sea Ice News According to NSIDC data, the Global sea ice area record for lowest minimum has just been broken, as shown on this Wipneus graph (world famous now because of what happened after September last year; see the dark red line on the right side of the graph which should be …
By Chris Mooney Ernest Shackleton, an early Antarctic explorer, once said, “What the ice gets, the ice keeps.” This means that once something is covered in ice, it and any associated information is preserved in the ice. Items can be large, such as animals that were on the glacier surface during a surprise snowstorm, or …
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