By Steve Connor14 December 2011 Dramatic and unprecedented plumes of methane – a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide – have been seen bubbling to the surface of the Arctic Ocean by scientists undertaking an extensive survey of the region. The scale and volume of the methane release has astonished the head […]
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 […]
November 24 (mongabay.com) – Recent arctic sea ice loss is ‘unprecedented’ over the past 1,450 years, concludes a reconstruction of ice records published in the journal Nature. The study, which was led by Christophe Kinnard of Chile’s Centro de Estudios Avanzados en Zonas Aridas, used terrestrial proxies including ice cores, lake sediments, tree ring data, […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
