SciencePoles news
Recent Polar Science and Climate Change news are featured here. Our news RSS feed will inform you when news are published on this website.
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Reindeer Castration to Help Reindeer Cope with Climate Change
14.06.2010
Rising winter temperatures and the freeze-thaw cycles that result create thick layers of ice on top of snow, preventing reindeer from reaching their food. A solution to this presented at the IPY Oslo Science Conference by Eli Risten Nergrd of Sámi University College and the Norwegian School of Vererinary Science…
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Warming Arctic Helps Archeologists Make Extraordinary Find
28.04.2010
Scientists have found artifacts dating back to 2,400 years ago in the Mackenzie Mountains in Canada’s Northwest Territories. The ancient hunting tools that had been frozen in patches of ice formed through the accumulation of snowfall over the years, which until recently remained frozen throughout the entire year.
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Traditional Inuit Forecasting Sharpens Scientific Arctic Weather Insights
09.04.2010
The Inuit have long relied upon their indigenous forecasting skills to determine when a good time to go on a hunt is, but now they are finding that their centuries-old knowledge is no longer quite as useful. As climate change has begun to alter the weather of the Arctic, the…
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Tuberculosis Cause for Concern in Nunavut
15.03.2010
According to a Northern indigenous group, tuberculosis is spreading quickly across the Canadian Arctic. The number of new infections diagnosed among Inuit peoples has more than doubled, from 41 to 88 since 2004, and infection rates are now 185 times higher than in non-natives.
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Prehistoric Ancestors’ Response to Past Climate Change Useful Today
12.03.2010
Since 2004, a team of scientists headed by the University at Buffalo anthropologist Ezra Zubrow has been working in the Arctic regions of Québec, northern Finland and Kamchatka (Russia) in an effort to understand how humans responded to climate changes some 4,000 to 6,000 years ago. The team hopes that…
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Humans Not Main Culprit in Musk Ox Population Decline After Last Ice Age
10.03.2010
A team of scientists found that human activity is not the reason behind the drastic decline in Arctic musk ox populations that began 12,000 years ago. The findings, to be published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), shows that while both human and musk ox…
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Tuft of Hair Used to Reconstruct Ancient Greenlander
11.02.2010
Scientists at the University of Copenhagen have done the first reconstruction of the nuclear genome of an extinct human using DNA retrieved from tufts of hair and bone fragments from a man who lived in Greenland some 4,000 years ago. Besides the four small pieces of bone and hair, no…
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Recent Sea Ice Survey Draws Attention to Arctic Warming Once Again
03.12.2009
Right before the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, a team of explorers and scientists wanted to draw attention to an increasingly warmer Arctic. The team departed on a 450-kilometre trek across the Arctic for 73 days in unfriendly terrain with temperatures of -40°C.
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Raising Awareness about Inuit Culture during the Year of the Inuit
30.11.2009
The Canadian Government has officially declared 2010 the Year of the Inuit in Canada to raise awareness about Inuit culture and issues.
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Accelerating Climate Change Requires Urgent Emission Reductions
30.11.2009
With ice sheets melting at an increasing rate and Arctic sea ice vanishing faster than projected, The Copenhagen Diagnosis, a new report documenting the key findings in climate change science since the publication of the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report in 2007, has been released to give an update on scientific…
