Study ranks marine mammals’ risks from Arctic shipping – “Even going right over the North Pole may be passable within a matter of decades”

By Heather McFarland 2 July 2018 (UAF News) – Bowhead whales are the marine mammals most vulnerable to disruption from increased ship traffic in waters off Alaska, a new study has concluded. Across the Arctic, narwhals are the most vulnerable.The study is the first to assess the vulnerability of the seven marine mammal species that […]

Arctic’s strongest sea ice breaks up for first time on record

By Jonathan Watts 21 August 2018 (The Guardian) – The oldest and thickest sea ice in the Arctic has started to break up, opening waters north of Greenland that are normally frozen, even in summer.This phenomenon – which has never been recorded before – has occurred twice this year due to warm winds and a […]

Warming in the North continues as predicted – “One of the ironies is that it takes a disaster to wake people up”

By Ned Rozell 21 June 2018 FAIRBANKS (Daily News-Miner) – Just outside my window here at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, workers are drilling into the asphalt of a parking lot using a truck-mounted rig. They twist a hollow bit 25 feet into the ground and pull up hard, clear evidence of why the blacktop […]

2017 was one of three warmest years on record, international report confirms – Greenhouse gas concentrations, sea level reach all-time highs

2 August 2018 (NOAA) – It’s official: 2017 was the third-warmest year on record for the globe, trailing 2016 and 2015, according to the 28th annual State of the Climate report. The planet also experienced record-high greenhouse gas concentrations as well as rises in sea level. The annual checkup for the planet, led by scientists […]

Planet at risk of heading toward “Hothouse Earth” state – “Places on Earth will become uninhabitable”

6 August 2018 (Stockholm Resilience Centre) – An international team of scientists has published a study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) showing that even if the carbon emission reductions called for in the Paris Agreement are met, there is a risk of Earth entering what the scientists call “Hothouse Earth” conditions.A […]

June 2018: Earth’s 5th warmest June on record

Dr. Jeff Masters 16 July 2018 (Weather Underground) – June 2018 was the planet’s fifth-warmest June since record keeping began in 1880, said NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) on Monday. NASA rated June 2018 as tied for third-warmest June on record. NOAA found that the only warmer June months were 2016, 2015, 2017 […]

Northern Barents Sea warms dramatically – Sea-ice area around Svalbard lowest ever recorded

By Thomas Nilsen 5 July 2018 (The Barents Observer) – The northern Barents Sea is an Arctic warming hotspot, says Sigrid Lind with the Marine Research Institute in Tromsø, Norway. Changes go from Arctic to Atlantic climate, concludes a study Lind and other scientists have made. The results are published in a recent article in […]

Global warming, 30 years later: Told you so

By Tamino 21 June 2018 (Open Mind) – Thirty years ago James Hansen testified in congress that man-made climate change (a.k.a. global warming) was underway. He forecast that the world would get hotter.What happened since? The world got hotter. He also forecast that the Arctic would warm even faster. What happened since? The Arctic warmed […]

Alaska sea ice took a steep, unprecedented dive to record low in winter 2018 – “There’s never ever been anything remotely like this for sea ice in the Bering Sea”

By Andrea Thompson 2 May 2018 (Scientific American) – April should be prime walrus hunting season for the native villages that dot Alaska’s remote western coast. In years past the winter sea ice where the animals rest would still be abundant, providing prime targets for subsistence hunters. But this year sea-ice coverage as of late […]

Researchers measure record concentration of microplastic in Arctic sea ice – “No one can say for certain how harmful these tiny plastic particles are for marine life, or ultimately also for human beings”

24 April 2018 (AWI) – Experts at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), have recently found higher amounts of microplastic in arctic sea ice than ever before. However, the majority of particles were microscopically small. The ice samples from five regions throughout the Arctic Ocean contained up to 12,000 […]

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