Toxic chemicals, anthrax - even nuclear waste - could be unleashed by global warming

Toxic chemicals, anthrax - even nuclear waste - could be unleashed by global warming

The state has just had its warmest spring on record, causing permafrost to thaw and dramatically reshaping some areas

A new paper shows that air temperature is the “smoking gun” behind climate change in the Arctic, according to John Walsh, chief scientist for the UAF International Arctic Research Center. Several University of Alaska Fairbanks researchers are co-authors on the paper, which says that “increasing air temperatures and precipitation are drivers of major changes in various components of the Arctic system.”

The release of methane and carbon dioxide from thawing permafrost will accelerate global warming and add up to $70tn (£54tn) to the world’s climate bill, according to the most advanced study yet of the economic consequences of a melting Arctic. If countries fail to improve on their Paris agreement commitments, this feedback mechanism, combined with a loss of heat-deflecting white ice, will cause a near 5% amplification of global warming and its associated costs, says the paper, which was published on Tuesday in Nature Communications.

The sudden collapse of thawing soils in the Arctic might double the warming from greenhouse gases released from tundra, warn Merritt R. Turetsky and colleagues.

Permafrost in some areas of the Canadian Arctic is thawing so fast that it's gulping up the equipment left there to study it.

Tiny fossils found in mudrock in the barren wilderness of the Canadian Arctic are the remains of the oldest known fungus on Earth, scientists say. The minuscule organisms were discovered in shallow water shale, a kind of fine-grained sedimentary rock, in a region south of Victoria island on the edge of the Arctic Ocean. Tests on the shale, which accumulated over millions of years in a river or lake, revealed that it formed between 900m and 1bn years ago in what is now the Northwest Territories.

After a 35 year hiatus, the U.S. Coast Guard is set to build a new heavy endurance icebreaker. The head of the sea service's acquisition office believes production on a new ship could start in five years—and will cost at least a billion dollars. According to USNI News, acquisition chief Rear Admiral Mike Haycock said the Coast Guard has finalized plans to buy a ship to replace the Polar Star, the service's only heavy icebreaker.

The warming Arctic has set another record. The average air temperature over Arctic land reached 1.3 degrees Celsius above average for the year ending in September. That's the highest since observations began in 1900. The new mark was noted in the annual Arctic Report Card, released Tuesday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The Arctic centres on the North Pole and reaches into North America and Eurasia.

An ancient fossil forest in Norway with tropical origins is one of the earliest forests to appear on Earth. By Mindy Weisberger. (Nov. 20)

BBC’s Frozen Planet

For millennia, the frozen lands of the far Northern Hemisphere have been a huge reservoir of carbon. The permafrost soils that characterize the Arctic and sub-Arctic tundra cover roughly 8 percent of the global land surface but hold half of Earth’s underground organic carbon and twice as much carbon as is currently in the atmosphere. Arctic tundra stores carbon during the summer and releases some of it during the winter.

In the Arctic, roads are magical. They appear in the fall and melt in the spring. Others, buckled by permafrost, undulate in the snow. Many are invisible to the naked eye — caribou migration routes that exist only by instinct. During the sunless, frigid winter, the Arctic Ocean becomes one vast road for polar bears and snowmobiles. Amid these roads, a new one is being built, an 85-mile sliver topped with gravel in Canada’s Northwest Territories.

The pounding noise shatters the ancient, eerie silence of the Davis Strait, a frigid finger of ocean separating Canada and Greenland. Thwick-thwack, thwick-thwack, thwick-thwack. It comes from above but the marine fog is thick, the source invisible. The sound gets closer, louder. THWICK-THWACK, THWICK-THWACK, THWICK-THWACK. The pilot wears an old red neoprene survival suit. But it's hot in the helicopter, and the bulky outfit's mittens...

Los Angeles-class submarine USS Hartford (SSN-768) breaking through several feet of solid ice in order to surface in the Arctic Circle.

Rolf Steinmann

Science and Shamanism in the Arctic. By Tim Fulford. (July ’13)

The town of Ny-Ålesund, the most northerly permanent civilian settlement in the world, also houses the largest laboratory for modern Arctic research in existence. By Anna Filipova.

Greenland has the world's highest suicide rate. And teen boys are at the highest risk.

The Arctic is on track to be free of sea ice this year or next for the first time in more than 100,000 years, a leading scientist has claimed. Provisional satellite data produced by the US National Snow & Ice Data Centre shows there were just over 11.1 million square kilometres of sea ice on 1 June this year, compared to the average for the last 30 years of nearly 12.7 million square kilometres. This difference – more than 1.5 million square kilometres – is about the same size as about six United Kingdoms.

As of Tuesday, the deepest cyclone in the Northern Hemisphere wasn’t anywhere near the tropics--it was spinning in the central Arctic Ocean. A surface low located near 83°N, about 500 miles from the North Pole and about 1000 miles north of Barrow, Alaska, deepened to a central pressure of 968 mb at 2 am EDT Tuesday morning, August 16. This is on par with the central pressure you might find in a moderately-sized Category 2 hurricane. The low harks back to the Great Arctic Cyclone of 2012.

Shipping routes across the Arctic are going to open up significantly this century even with a best-case reduction in CO2 emissions, a new study suggests.

Sea ice is at a record-low extent for late October in the Arctic and close to a record low in the Antarctic. The latter is a big change from unusually high extents in recent years. The global total of sea ice (Arctic plus Antarctic] is more than 1 million square kilometers below the previous record for late October.

Arctic sea ice has not only been shrinking in surface area in recent years, it’s becoming younger and thinner as well. In this animation, where the ice cover almost looks gelatinous as it pulses through the seasons, cryospheric scientist Dr. Walt Meier of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center describes how the sea ice has undergone fundamental changes during the era of satellite measurements.

A new animation from NASA shows the movement of Arctic sea ice, the large mass of frozen water on the Arctic Ocean, in a stunning time-lapse spanning three decades.

In the tiny Arctic hamlet of Igloolik, Nunavut, hunters say a mysterious sound, seemingly coming from the bottom of the sea, is driving wildlife away. According to the CBC, locals have different theories about its source, and have attributed this “ping” or “hum” to a mining company that has operated nearby, or even to sabotage by Greenpeace. Both entities denied having anything to do with the phenomenon that hunters allege has made an area once teeming with wildlife a bit more barren over the course of the summer.

A mysterious noise emanating from the sea floor in one of Canada’s northern territories has been puzzling locals and officials, who have yet to identify its source. The sound has been heard throughout Fury and Hecla strait, a channel of water in the Nunavut region, and has proven to be a mystery for the local community. The remote area is located in the northernmost territory of Canada, where some residents rely on hunting for their food supplies.

It’s a mistake seen in the maps issued by Elections Canada, the National Research Council and the Canadian Armed Forces. It’s even in the official Atlas of Canada and on hundreds of relief maps hung up in schoolrooms across the country. For nearly 100 years, the government of Canada has been printing official maps incorrectly pretending that it owns a U.K.-sized chunk of international waters. “There’s no such thing as having a border hundreds of miles from your territorial lands,” says Heather Exner-Pirot, managing editor of the peer-reviewed Arctic Yearbook.

The Arctic archipelago of Svalbard has seen such extreme warmth this year that the average annual temperature could end up above freezing for the first time on record, scientists have said. Ketil Isaksen of the Norwegian Meterological Institute said that the average temperature in Longyearbyen, the main settlement in Svalbard, is expected to be around 0 Celsius (32 Fahrenheit) with a little over a month left of the year. "This is a little bit shocking," Isaksen said. "If you had asked me five or 10 years ago, I could not have imagined such numbers in 2016."

Scientists meeting in San Francisco issue their 2016 report card. By Christopher Joyce.

The magma stream should help geophysicists predict more accurately if and when the magnetic field of the planet’s core will flip, and the magnetic north and south poles trade places, which happens every few thousand years. By Andy Coghlan.