By Dag Vongraven 20 September 2019 (PBSG) – At the last meeting of the IUCN/SSC Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG) in Anchorage in 2016, the group agreed that there was a need for new and documented criteria for the assessment of status and trends of polar bear populations. Work to develop a new set of […]
By Rebecca Morelle 25 October 2019 (BBC News) – A photography project has highlighted the extent of ice loss from Iceland’s glaciers. A team from Scotland and Iceland compared photographs taken in the 1980s with present-day drone images. They focused on the south side of the Vatnajökull ice cap, which covers about 7,700sq km of […]
By Olga Gertcyk 16 October 2019 (The Siberian Times) – ‘Blooming’ might be the last word to associate with the Arctic, yet pictures below show meadows bursting with life as brightly-coloured flowers blossom in lush green grass. And while vegetation in khasyreis, basins of drained Arctic lakes, is less of a surprise, researchers discovered ‘bursts […]
3 October 2019 (NSIDC) – Arctic sea ice began its autumn regrowth in the last 12 days of September, with the ice edge expanding along a broad front in the western Arctic Ocean. Overall, the summer of 2019 was exceptionally warm, with repeated pulses of very warm air from northern Siberia and the Bering Strait. […]
By Olga Gertcyk 30 September 2019 (The Siberian Times) – More than 40,000 wild reindeer perished since the last count in 2017, said scientists who returned from a major expedition to the Taymyr Peninsula. The Yenisei group of reindeer has disappeared entirely while the westernmost group living along the Tareya River has dramatically shrunk in […]
By Anton Troianovski and Chris Mooney 3 October 2019 ON THE ZYRYANKA RIVER, Russia (The Washington Post) – Andrey Danilov eased his motorboat onto the gravel riverbank, where the bones of a woolly mammoth lay scattered on the beach. A putrid odor filled the air — the stench of ancient plants and animals decomposing after […]
By Alec Luhn 8 October 2019 MOSCOW (The Telegraph) – Russian scientists in the Arctic Ocean said they have discovered the most powerful methane gas fountain ever recorded, highlighting the danger of this greenhouse gas accelerating climate change or causing an oil or gas spill as it erupts from thawing permafrost. A research expedition from […]
By Henrik Olav Mathiesen 11 September 2019 (The Dark Mountain Project) – Equinor is the publicly owned Norwegian company firmly intent upon wreaking havoc on the world for as long as possible. Off our own shores – and far beyond. In 2017, the company won the bid for two licences to drill offshore in the […]
By Chris Mooney and John Muyskens 11 September 2019 LA CORONILLA, Uruguay (The Washington Post) – The day the yellow clams turned black is seared in Ramón Agüero’s memory. It was the summer of 1994. A few days earlier, he had collected a generous haul, 20 buckets of the thin-shelled, cold-water clams, which burrow a […]
By Steven Mufson and Juliet Eilperin 13 September 2019 (The Washington Post) – The Trump administration on Thursday said it would seek to open up the entire coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas exploration, picking the most aggressive development option for an area long closed to drilling. In filing […]
