Fairbanks, Alaska — Permafrost warming continues throughout a wide swath of the Northern Hemisphere, according to a team of scientists assembled during the recent International Polar Year. Their extensive findings, published in the April-June 2010 edition of Permafrost and Periglacial Processes, describe the thermal state of high-latitude permafrost during the International Polar Year, 2007-2009. Vladimir […]
ScienceDaily (May 6, 2010) — Among the worrisome environmental effects of global warming is the thawing of Arctic permafrost — soil that normally remains at or below the freezing point for at least a two-year period and often much longer. Monitoring changes in permafrost is difficult with current methods, but a study by University of […]
Editing by Philippa Fletcher OSLO (Reuters) – Thawing permafrost can release nitrous oxide, also known as laughing gas, a contributor to climate change that has been largely overlooked in the Arctic, a study showed on Sunday. The report in the journal Nature Geoscience indicated that emissions of the gas surged under certain conditions from melting […]
(AFP) Recently a team from Russia, the US, and Sweden found that the East Siberian Arctic Shelf (ESAS) is releasing around 8 teragrams of methane from subsea sediments each year. Now team member Natalia Shakhova and colleague Dmitry Nicolsky have come up with a new model for the Dmitry Laptev Strait region of the shelf […]
By John Platt Mammals, birds and fish living in the High Arctic experienced an average 26 percent drop in their populations between 1970 and 2004 due to the loss of sea ice, according to a new report from The Arctic Species Trend Index (ASTI), Tracking Trends in Arctic Wildlife [pdf]. The 2010 report, commissioned and […]
By Margaret Munro, Canwest News ServiceMarch 9, 2010 From the balmy Arctic, to the open water of the St. Lawrence and snowless western fields, this winter has been the warmest and driest in Canadian record books. Environment Canada scientists report that winter 2009/10 was 4C above normal, making it the warmest since nationwide records were […]
Reporting by Timothy Gardner; Editing by Eric WalshWASHINGTONFri Feb 5, 2010 6:08pm EST (Reuters) – Arctic ice melting could cost global agriculture, real estate and insurance anywhere from $2.4 trillion to $24 trillion by 2050 in damage from rising sea levels, floods and heat waves, according to a report released on Friday. “Everybody around the […]
Summertime observations of dissolved CH4 in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf (ESAS) (21). … (D) Fluxes of CH4 venting to the atmosphere over the ESAS. Remobilization to the atmosphere of only a small fraction of the methane held in East Siberian Arctic Shelf (ESAS) sediments could trigger abrupt climate warming, yet it is believed that […]
ScienceDaily (Feb. 17, 2010) — The southern limit of permanently frozen ground, or permafrost, is now 130 kilometers further north than it was 50 years ago in the James Bay region, according to two researchers from the Department of Biology at Université Laval. In a recent issue of the scientific journal Permafrost and Periglacial […]
The treeless ecosystem of mosses, lichens, and berry plants is giving way to shrub land and boreal forest. As scientists study the transformation, they are discovering that major warming-related events, including fires and the collapse of slopes due to melting permafrost, are leading to the loss of tundra in the Arctic. By Bill Sherwonit During […]
