By Bill Rigby27 December 2011 SEATTLE – Scientists in Alaska are investigating whether local seals are being sickened by radiation from Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear plant. Scores of ring seals have washed up on Alaska’s Arctic coastline since July, suffering or killed by a mysterious disease marked by bleeding lesions on the hind flippers, irritated […]
By JUSTIN GILLIS20 December 2011 In my article over the weekend about the climate risks from buried Arctic carbon, I omitted any discussion of one issue that sometimes appears in the news: methane deposits under relatively shallow seawater near the coasts of Siberia, Canada and Alaska. It was a purposeful omission because my piece focused […]
By JUSTIN GILLIS16 December 2011 FAIRBANKS, Alaska – A bubble rose through a hole in the surface of a frozen lake. It popped, followed by another, and another, as if a pot were somehow boiling in the icy depths. Every bursting bubble sent up a puff of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas generated beneath the […]
Preparing for the winter storms, a bulldozer piles up a protective bank on the north shore. The coastline has become increasingly vulnerable to erosion as the sea ice retreats. More open water allows waves to build up in the fierce Arctic winds. Point Hope lies south of lease site 193 where oil giant Shell plan […]
By Geoffrey York 5 December 2011 DURBAN, SOUTH AFRICA — From Monday’s Globe and Mail It took 30 hours of flying, but Inuit hunter Jordan Konek has arrived in the land of surfers and palm trees with a message for the world’s politicians: Climate change is real, and it could devastate Canada’s Arctic people. At […]
By Felicity Carus, guardian.co.uk30 November 2011 A native American community in remote Alaska this week revived legal efforts to hold some of the world’s largest energy companies accountable for allegedly destroying their village because of global warming. The so-called “climigration” trial would be the first of its kind, potentially creating a precedent in the US […]
By Yereth Rosen; Editing by Dan Whitcomb, Peter Bohan, and Paul Simao10 November 2011 Anchorage, Alaska (Reuters) – A storm forecast to be one of the worst on record in Alaska lashed the state’s western coastline Wednesday, tearing roofs off buildings and pushing water and debris into communities, authorities said. The storm, which began hitting […]
November 9 (CNN) – A winter storm of hurricane strength was slamming Alaska early Wednesday with winds of up to 100 mph, high seas and blizzard conditions. The National Weather Service called the storm moving into the state off the Bering Sea “a powerful and extremely dangerous storm of record or near-record magnitude.” Early Wednesday, […]
By Brian Clark Howard, National Geographic News 11 October 2011 The air in the auditorium smelled faintly of burnt herbs. Josefina Lema Aguilar, a Kichwa elder from the mountains of Ecuador, lit a tiny sacred fire to bless last week’s conference on “Seeking Balance: Indigenous Knowledge, Western Science and Climate Change.” Dressed in traditional garb […]
By Richard Gray, Science Correspondent26 June 2011 Warming ocean waters are causing the largest movement of marine species seen on Earth in more than two million years, according to scientists. In the Arctic, melting sea ice during recent summers has allowed a passage to open up from the Pacific ocean into the North Atlantic, allowing […]
