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Scientists investigate a particular kind of fish that has evolved to survive in the severe arctic climate. However, on a field trip in 2018, they discovered an unusual phenomenon: several of the fish had terrible skin tumors.
Life in the Arctic is harsh. Arctic temperatures are punishing, making life difficult for many animals to survive. Yet lots of insects, including mosquitoes, manage to thrive in the frozen region. So why don't they freeze themselves?
Whales are huge, but they live in an even larger environment—the world's oceans. Researchers use a range of tools to study their whereabouts, including satellite tracking, aerial surveys, sightings and deploying individual hydrophones to listen for their calls.
Rising temperatures are melting the Arctic sea-ice on which polar bears hunt, limiting their access to food. A recent study has found a remote population of polar bears that have adapted to hunt on chunks of glacier ice.
As we know, the Arctic tundra won't be around much longer. Climate change is causing the sea levels to rise, and the ice to melt, which is also, in turn, wiping out the plant and animal species that live there. And unfortunately things aren't much different in Siberia.
Home to polar bears, the midnight sun and the northern lights, a Norwegian archipelago perched high in the Arctic is trying to find a way to profit from its pristine wilderness without ruining it.
These are strange times for the Indigenous Nenets reindeer herders of northern Siberia. In their lands on the shores of the Arctic Ocean, bare tundra is thawing, bushes are sprouting, and willows that a generation ago struggled to reach knee height now grow 3 meters tall, hiding the reindeer. Su ...
At first, it was a simple question: what exactly did oil pollution do to gray seals off the coast of Norway?
With marine heat waves helping to wipe out some of Alaska’s storied salmon runs in recent years, officials have resorted to sending emergency food shipments to affected communities while scientists warn that the industry’s days of traditional harvests may be numbered.
Researchers at the Barcelona Expert Center (BEC) of the Institut de Ciències del Mar (ICM-CSIC) have proved that satellite-derived salinity improves marine circulation prediction in the Arctic, which, as in the rest of the planet, is directly influenced by this and other parameters such as tempe ...
A new study published in Ocean Science conducted by CAGE Ph.D. candidate Knut Ola Dølven and co-authors presents time-series data from two methane seep sites offshore western Svalbard, in the Arctic.
The combined effects of climate change and nutrient availability on Arctic vegetation growth are poorly understood. Archaeological sites in the Arctic could represent unique nutrient hotspots for studying the long-term effect of nutrient enrichment.
Small fish are abundant in the 200-600 m deep Atlantic water layer of the Amundsen Basin, according to a unique hydroacoustic dataset collected by the EFICA Consortium, which revealed a "deep scattering layer" (DSL) consisting of zooplanktion and fish along the MOSAiC expedition's 3170 km long t ...
Canada is known for its varied landscape, ranging from mountains and rolling plains, to rivers, lakes and Arctic tundras. It is therefore unsurprising that a great variety of animals make this region its home.
We may lose up to three meters of coastline in the Arctic every year by 2100 if greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced, according to a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change. The authors also warn about bigger waves due to increasing temperatures, making the coastline very vulner ...
In the last five years, scientists have observed sea animals dying off at an alarming rate in the northern Pacific waters.
Cultural heritage sites are irreplaceable sources of historical information, providing insight into the social, religious, and economic life of our ancestors. They are important markers of identity, and constitute attractions to both locals and visitors, and can thus play an important role in a ...
Ihad dreamed about photographing polar bears for a long time. Some time ago my hobby, wildlife photography, ceased to be just a hobby and turned into a large part of my life.
IT'S EARLY August and the research vessel Barba sails at 80 degrees north along the coastline of Svalbard. The endless Arctic sun lies low on the horizon, the ocean is calm, and the temperate a mild 5 degrees.
As the arctic warms four times faster than the global average, Europe’s only indigenous population is under threat. For centuries, the Sámi people have herded reindeer throughout northern Europe.
An Asian megacity partially locked down because of pollution. Acres of farms in Africa destroyed by extreme weather. Ancient Arctic cultures disappearing with melting ice. This isn’t the future. It’s happening now.
Irina Panyushkina grew up in Siberia, near the Arctic Circle. She was raised on stories of explorers trudging through seas of ice to reach the North Pole.
Thawing Arctic permafrost laden with billions of tonnes of greenhouse gases not only threatens the region's critical infrastructure but life across the planet, according a comprehensive scientific review.
I stepped onto the battlefield of climate change, sidestepping carcass after carcass. In the grass were the remains of Arctic terns, common terns, and roseate terns. Along the boulders, researchers pointed out dead puffin chicks.
The transformation of the rapidly warming Arctic is being accelerated by a wave of thousands of newcomers that are waddling and paddling northwards: beavers.
As the Arctic and the oceans warm due to climate change, understanding how a rapidly changing environment may affect birds making annual journeys between the Arctic and the high seas is vital to international conservation efforts.
As the UN Climate Change Conference (COP 26) called on nations to cooperate on mitigating climate change, nowhere is this call more urgent than in the Arctic region.
The field of pathogens in northern wildlife is ripe for further study, according to some scientists
The ice shelf was cracking up. Surveys showed warm ocean water eroding its underbelly. Satellite imagery revealed long, parallel fissures in the frozen expanse, like scratches from some clawed monster. One fracture grew so big, so fast, scientists took to calling it “the dagger.”
The highest temperature ever recorded in the Arctic, 38C (100F), has been officially confirmed, sounding "alarm bells" over Earth's changing climate.
While a reduction in frozen ocean surface is one of the most widely recognised impacts of Arctic warming, it has also long been anticipated that a warmer Arctic will be a wetter one too, with more intense cycling of water between land, atmosphere and ocean.
The warship HMS Terror lies at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean in the Northwest passage, lost in 1848 after two grueling years stuck in the Arctic ice. Rescue missions launched to recover the ship in 1851 suffered the same fate, crushed under the year-round ice that encased Northern Canada and th ...
The Arctic Ocean has been warming since the onset of the 20th century, decades earlier than instrument observations would suggest, according to new research.
The reason for the increased attention is that the Arctic is becoming a new stage for some of the most defining issues of our time: climate change, the urgent need for inclusive and sustainable development, and geopolitics.
In one of the planet’s coldest places, 130 km south of Russia’s Arctic coast, scientist Sergey Zimov can find no sign of permafrost as global warming permeates Siberia’s soil.
The disruption from the climate emergency being experienced by marine wildlife reached a new high in the first week of Cop26, when a female walrus was discovered sleeping on a submarine in a naval base in North Holland.
Climate change is disproportionately affecting the polar regions. In a paper published earlier this year, researchers from the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) revealed that in the last just the last 50 years, the Arctic warmed up by nearly three times quicker than the rest of t ...
The annual migration of birds from the Arctic to the Gulf of Mannar Marine Biosphere Reserve, has begun with an enormous flock seen swarming the Manoli Islands inside the park last weekend.
Sweating, headaches, fatigue, dehydration – the ways heat exhaustion affects the human body are well documented. As temperatures inch up year by year we need to change the way we live, creating cooler places that provide refuge from heat.
One way that scientists monitor climate change is through the measure of sea ice extent. Sea ice extent is the area of ice that covers the Arctic Ocean at a given time. Sea ice plays an important role in reflecting sunlight back into space, regulating ocean and air temperature, circulating ocean ...
In a pair of recently published papers, Michael Rawlins, a professor in the University of Massachusetts Amherst's geosciences department and associate director of the Climate System Research Center, has made significant gains in filling out our understanding of the Arctic's carbon cycle—or the w ...
The melting of polar ice is not only shifting the levels of our oceans, it is changing the planet Earth itself. Newly minted Ph.D. Sophie Coulson and her colleagues explained in a recent paper in Geophysical Research Letters that, as glacial ice from Greenland, Antarctica, and the Arctic Islands ...
A massive Russian icebreaker ship clears a path to the North Pole, cutting through the thin ice of the Arctic Ocean. Even in this far-flung region, the impact of climate change can be seen.
Warmer air weakens the vortex, which normally keeps cold air trapped in Arctic, letting it go south. Warming of the Arctic caused by climate change has increased the number of polar vortex outbreaks, when frigid air from the far north bathes other parts of the Northern Hemisphere in killer cold, ...
In June, the Central Arctic Ocean Fisheries Agreement entered into force, bringing to fruition a diplomatic effort that began more than a decade ago.
Like many people, I will remember this summer in shades of gray and red. As snapshots of a dull orange sun circulated social media, "zombie fires" rose from the Russian permafrost, entire towns were wiped off the map and Southern Europe became a scene of the apocalypse.Satellites tracked enormou ...
Climate change is driving periods of unusually high temperature across large swaths of the planet. These heat waves are especially detrimental in the Arctic, where they can push surface temperatures in regions of significant permafrost past the melting point of ice lenses.
As the North Pole, the Arctic Ocean, and the surrounding Arctic land warm rapidly, scientists are racing to understand the warming's effects on Arctic ecosystems. With shrinking sea ice, more light reaches the surface of the Arctic Ocean. Some have predicted that this will lead to more plankton, ...
Natural silence -- the kind when you hear nothing but the sound of nature around you -- is becoming increasingly scarce. The rumblings of man-made noise can be heard even in the remote corners of national parks and deep in the Arctic Ocean.
Known as 'forever' chemicals due to the fact they do not break down in the environment, poly- and perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are used in a wide range of products and processes from fire proofing to stain resistant surfaces.
New studies suggest that rising temperatures may prove disastrous for species of birds, fish and other animals that are adapted to the cold of Arctic climes.
Global warning may have already passed an irreversible tipping point, the scientist who led the biggest-ever expedition to the Arctic has warned.
A team from the Centre for Earth Observation Science at the University of Manitoba has published a paper in the Nature journal Communications Earth & Environment that addresses a large gap in our understanding of Arctic Sea Ice coverage.
US President Joe Biden's administration announced Tuesday it was halting petroleum development activity in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, reversing a move by former president Donald Trump to allow drilling.
Scientists have uncovered a summertime climate pattern in and around the Arctic that could drive co-occurrences of European heatwaves and large-scale wildfires with air pollution over Siberia and subpolar North America.
What is Arctic amplification? Do we know what is causing this phenomenon? What effects is it having, both in the region and for the world? Is Antarctica experiencing the same thing?
Australian biologist Sacha Dench has been nicknamed “the Human Swan”, in recognition of her record-breaking, 7,000 kilometre, paramotor (motorized paraglider) flight, tracking Bewick swans across 11 countries, from Arctic Russian to the UK. Ahead of International Day for Biological Diversity, Ms ...
Scientists with the European Space Agency (ESA) said on May 25, 2021, that satellite data have revealed how much warming Atlantic waters are intruding on Arctic sea ice. They said they made their announcement “with alarm bells ringing about the rapid demise of sea ice in the Arctic.”
This year has already seen its fair share of unsettling climate news. For the first time, the Amazon rainforest was recognised as a net emitter of greenhouse gases. The increased melting of glaciers in the Arctic and Antarctic is causing the earth’s poles to drift.
A drastic drop in caribou and shorebird populations is a reflection of the dire changes unfolding on the Arctic tundra, according to a new report from the Arctic Council.
With decennial arctic ice drops of 13.1 percent and rising temperatures, per NASA figures, more countries and businesses have deemed it imperative to stop or slow down climate change. While adopting ecologically mindful practices would require spending from the private sector,
Today, bowhead whales still transit the fringes of Arctic waters. Polar bears hunt blubbery ringed seals from rafts of ice. And ivory gulls ride gale force winds, plucking juvenile polar cod from the roiling sea. But for how much longer?
The image of the Arctic as a frozen wasteland could soon be a thing of the past thanks to climate change, with the region warming at double the rate of other areas of the planet.
The aquatic animal known as the sponge is often described as entirely sessile: once they've settled in a spot and matured, they aren't generally thought of as moving around. But, according to a new study in the journal Current Biology on April 26—in which researchers describe mysterious trails o ...
As an indicator and amplifier of global climate change, the Arctic's health and stability is the cornerstone of the stability of our climate system. It has far-reaching impacts on ecosystems, coastal resilience and human settlements in the middle and high latitudes.
Europe endured record heat and rainfall last year while temperatures in Arctic Siberia soared off the charts, the European Union's climate monitoring service reported Thursday.
Lightning strikes are an extremely rare phenomenon in the Arctic Circle – but as the global climate has begun to warm, these events have become more common. Just in 2019, lighting hit 483 kilometers (300 miles) of the North Pole, the northernmost instance on record.
Tropical waters are known for their bright sunlight above and their richly colorful biodiversity below. These two things aren’t unrelated; for the many tropical species that exhibit biofluorescence — that is, the ability to absorb light energy and reemit it as different colored light — the sunli ...
Roughly two weeks ago, a massive iceberg calved from the Antarctic Ice Sheet. As the only research vessel nearby, the Polarstern took the opportunity to enter the area between the iceberg and the Brunt Ice Shelf.
Permafrost thaw is one of the world’s most pressing climate problems, already disrupting lifestyles, livelihoods, economies, and ecosystems in the north, and threatening to spill beyond the boundaries of the Arctic as our planet continues to warm.
An Arctic walrus was spotted on the Atlantic coast of Ireland for the first time since 2004. It was seen by a 5-year-old girl who was walking with her father.
The diverse and rich ecosystems of Arqvilliit (Ottawa Islands) are a refuge and feeding and breeding ground for northeastern Hudson Bay species, from polar bears and marine mammals to the thousands of eider ducks that nest here.
New findings on the diet of Arctic foxes, determined by the condition of their teeth, show how varying climate conditions in the Arctic affect the animals that live there.
Millions of migratory birds occupy seasonally favorable breeding grounds in the Arctic, but scientists know little about the formation, maintenance and future of the migration routes of Arctic birds and the genetic determinants of migratory distance.
The Arctic is once again at the centre of geopolitical and strategic discussions, mainly for one reason – climate change – and it is imperative to act now, write Virginijus Sinkevičius and Boris Herrmann.
Herd immunity, when a threshold proportion of a population becomes immune to a disease-causing organism, reducing or stopping further transmission, is very much in the news. Avian cholera much less so.
An international team of researchers has found evidence implicating a deep underground reservoir as the source of high levels of methane in the waters of the East Siberian Arctic Ocean. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes testing three ...
Polar bears and narwhals are using up to four times as much energy to survive because of major ice loss in the Arctic, according to scientists.
China is just one of many countries in the Northern Hemisphere experiencing an extremely cold winter due in part to both the tropical Pacific and the Arctic, according to an analysis of temperatures from Dec. 1, 2020 to mid-January of 2021.
From stronger storms to Arctic warming to California fires, rising atmospheric carbon levels mean there's no escaping the fallout from global warming. Now, we're plunged into a new world of managing the consequences.
In the summer of 2021, a group of Estonian sailors and scientists are planning a sailing trip to the Arctic; the purpose of the trip is to draw attention to climate change in the region.
Rising global temperatures are causing frozen Arctic soil— permafrost—in the northern hemisphere to thaw and release CO2 that has been stored within it for thousands of years. The amount of carbon stored in permafrost is estimated to be four times greater than the combined amount of CO2 emitted ...
It's clear that rising greenhouse gas emissions are the main driver of global warming. But on a regional level, several other factors are at play. That's especially true in the Arctic—a massive oceanic region around the North Pole which is warming two to three times faster than the rest of the p ...
Researchers from SINTEF, the Norwegian Polar Institute and the University Centre in Svalbard have collected samples from Arctic crustaceans close to the settlement of Ny-Ålesund on the west coast of Spitsbergen. During the spring and summer, they discovered a number of drugs in a variety of diff ...
Climate change is more pronounced in the Arctic than anywhere else on the planet, raising concerns about the ability of wildlife to cope with the new conditions. A new study shows that rare insects are declining, suggesting that climatic changes may favor common species.
The Arctic has long proven to be a barometer of the health of our planet. This remote part of the world faces unprecedented environmental assaults, as climate change and industrial chemicals threaten a way of life for Inuit and other Indigenous and northern communities that rely heavily on seafo ...
Climate change is having a widespread effect on lakes across the Northern Hemisphere, a new study has found. The study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, examined 122 lakes from 1939 to 2016 in North America, Europe and Asia, and found that ice-free years have become more th ...
In the far north, the swelling Arctic Ocean inundated vast swaths of coastal tundra and steppe ecosystems. Though the ocean water was only a few degrees above freezing, it started to thaw the permafrost beneath it, exposing billions of tons of organic matter to microbial breakdown.
The Norwegian fishing village of Bugøynes, 310 miles north of the Arctic Circle and a frigid, dark place for much of the year, was on the edge of ruin.
New study suggests waters will become more turbulent as Arctic loses summertime ice.Eddies are often seen as the weather of the ocean. Like large-scale circulations in the atmosphere, eddies swirl through the ocean as slow-moving sea cyclones, sweeping up nutrients and heat, and transporting the ...
Under the sea ice, the Arctic Ocean is one of the quietest places on Earth. But it can be very noisy when the ice is forming and breaking up or during storms and when glaciers are calving.
The world is changing in dramatic ways, especially in the High Arctic. Climate change has meant that spring arrives earlier, but winters have become far more treacherous for Arctic animals that overwinter there, with more rain and ice.
Language is everything. Those who argue for oil drilling in the Arctic national wildlife refuge, a place of stunning wild beauty in far north-east Alaska, seldom call it what it is – a refuge.
Arctic sea ice has been in steep decline over the past two decades. A study of tundra shrubs published today in the journal PNAS shows that as sea ice disappears, the Arctic is becoming both greener and browner.
At just over 14 million square kilometres, the Arctic Ocean is the smallest and shallowest of the world’s oceans. It is also the coldest. An expansive raft of sea ice floats near its centre, expanding in the long, cold, dark winter, and contracting in the summer, as the Sun climbs higher in the sky.
By the time the war broke out in Syria, researchers from the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) had already duplicated and safely transported most of their genetic treasure trove to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault on the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen, N ...
NOAA's 15th Arctic Report Card catalogs for 2020 the numerous ways that climate change continues to disrupt the polar region, with second-highest air temperatures and second-lowest summer sea ice driving a cascade of impacts, including the loss of snow and extraordinary wildfires in northern Russia.
In the arctic tundra of northeastern Siberia lies a graveyard of a now-extinct species of megafauna, the woolly rhinoceros, dating back 50,000 years. Now, a new genomic analysis of the remains of 14 of these fantastical furry yellow creatures shows that climate change was the likely culprit for ...
Small photosynthetic marine algae are a key component of the Arctic marine ecosystem but their role for the ecology of the Arctic Ocean have been underestimated for decades. That's the conclusion of a team of scientists who synthesized more than half a century of research about the occurrence, m ...
When the Arctic researchers Jacqueline Grebmeier and Lee Cooper made their annual scientific pilgrimage to frigid seas off Alaska last month, what they found was startling.