October 15 (NRK/Press release) – The melting of the Arctic sea ice is progressing much faster and more dramatically than earlier estimated, according to new research by the Norwegian Polar Institute (NPI). This means that the Arctic Sea could be free of ice in the summer in ten years time, rather than the 50 to […]
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 […]
[The usual Desdemona disclaimer: So the leaders of men conceived of their most desperate strategy yet.] 12 October 2011 A U.S. panel has called for a concerted effort to study proposals to manipulate the climate to slow global warming — a heretical notion among some environmentalists. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, Jane C. […]
Why did ice extent fall to a near record low without the sort of extreme weather conditions seen in 2007? One explanation is that the ice cover is thinner than it used to be; the melt season starts with more first-year ice (ice that formed the previous autumn and winter) and less of the generally […]
By Randy Boswell, Postmedia News 5 October 2011 The Arctic’s oldest, thickest sea ice — much of which used to survive the year’s warmest months — had all but disappeared by the end of this summer’s near-record meltdown, according to new U.S. analyses that vividly show how the circumpolar region is being transformed by warmer […]
Loss of the Earth’s ozone layer above the Arctic last winter was unprecedented, scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory told CNN on Monday. In findings published in a new study in the journal Nature, scientists said a hole in the ozone was caused by an unusually long period of low temperatures in the stratosphere, the […]
By Gavin Schmidt21 September 2011 After a record-breaking 2010 in terms of surface melt area in Greenland [Tedesco et al., 2011], numbers from 2011 have been eagerly awaited. Marco Tedseco and his group have now just reported their results. This is unrelated to other Greenland meltdown this week that occurred at the launch of the […]
By IAN AUSTEN28 September 2011 Canada’s Arctic ice shelves, formations that date back thousands of years, have been almost halved in size over the last six years, Canadian researchers said on Tuesday. Researchers at Carleton University in Ottawa, who regularly analyze satellite images from the region, also found that a major portion of the ice […]
By Emma Woollacott26 September 2011 Bowhead whales have navigated the Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans for what could be the first time in nearly 10,000 years. Researchers from the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources used satellite tracking to monitor the movements of the whales – and found that, last year, whales from […]
By Tamino17 September 2011 […] One of the best long-term (on a century time scale) estimates of Arctic sea ice is the Walsh & Chapman data set (described in Walsh & Chapman 2001, Annals of Glaciology, 33, 444-448). It’s based on a vast array of available information, as described in Walsh & Chapman. […] It […]
