By Richard Black, Environment correspondent, BBC News20 May 2012 Scientists have identified thousands of sites in the Arctic where methane that has been stored for many millennia is bubbling into the atmosphere. The methane has been trapped by ice, but is able to escape as the ice melts. Writing in the journal Nature Geoscience, the […]
By Michael van Baker 30 April 2012 Gulf of Alaska Keeper, a non-profit organization that estimates it has cleared nearly 1,000,000 pounds of plastic debris from Alaskan coasts over the past 10 years, is reporting “tons” of what it believes is likely tsunami debris washing up on the coasts of the Kayak and Montague islands. […]
25 April 2012 (RTCC) – The villagers of Newtok in Alaska could have gained the undesirable title of America’s first climate change refugees. The community in the west of the state has undergone drastic changes as melting permafrost has literally shifted the ground beneath them and the loss of sea ice has removed a vital […]
By Jonathan Bamber, www.guardian.co.uk 15 April 2012 Glaciers are one of the natural environments most often used to illustrate the impacts of climate change. It is fairly indisputable that in a warming world, glaciers melt faster. Yet two recent studies published in top scientific journals (more here and here) suggest that in the Himalayas the […]
SYDNEY, 13 April 2012 (AFP) – Sea levels in the southwest Pacific started rising drastically in the 1880s, with a notable peak in the 1990s thought to be linked to human-induced climate change, according to a new study. The research, which examined sediment core samples taken from salt marshes in southern Australia’s Tasmania island, used […]
Contact Information:Paul Laustsen, USGS, 650-329-4046Bruce Woods, US F&WS, 907-786-36956 April 2012 ANCHORAGE – In the past two weeks, 9 polar bears in the southern Beaufort Sea region near Barrow were observed with alopecia, or loss of fur, and other skin lesions. The animals were otherwise healthy in appearance and behavior. The cause and significance of […]
8 April 2012 (CNN) – While winter is a distant memory for most Americans, it continues unabated in Anchorage, Alaska — where a new bout of precipitation this weekend helped the city break its record for seasonal snowfall, at more than 133 inches (3.38 meters). Some 3.4 inches of snow — and counting — had fallen […]
By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer17 March 2012 WASHINGTON — America’s weather is stuck on extreme. Nearly 11 feet of snow has fallen on Anchorage, Alaska, this winter. That’s almost a record, and it’s forcing the city to haul away at least 250,000 tons of snow. Yet not much snow has dropped on the Lower […]
By Margaret Kriz Hobson28 January 2012 A group of 573 scientists today released a letter (PDF) to President Obama asking him to stop oil drilling in Alaska’s Arctic waters until experts can study the proposed oil development’s impacts on sensitive Arctic ecosystems and native subsistence activities. … “We want to make it a high priority […]
[Desdemona suspects this: Sequential Collapse of Marine Mammals in the North Pacific Ocean and southern Bering Sea.] By Remy Melina, LiveScience.com 19 January 2012 Killer whales and other ocean predators are targeting and killing the pups of a threatened northern sea lion species at an increasingly high rate, scientists warned this week. Without a reduction […]
