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.

Oil Industry Infrastructures Providing Nesting Grounds for Predators of Nesting Bird Species

09.09.2009

A joint study by the Wildlife Conservation Society, the U.S. Fish andWildlife Service, and other groups, recently published in EcologicalApplications, shows that oil industry infrastructure is having animpact on nesting bird populations by providing a place for theirpredators to live. These predators - mostly arctic foxes, ravens andgulls - use…
Ice-Free Northeast Passage Allows First Commercial Voyage Ever without Icebreakers

08.09.2009

For the fourth time in only five years, the Northeast Passage has opened, cutting 4,500 miles off the 12,500-mile trip from the European Atlantic to the Asian Pacific for shipping companies. Two German ships recently were able to make the first commercial voyage ever through the Northeast Passage without the…
Climate Change May Alter UV Levels around the Globe

08.09.2009

While the use of ozone-damaging chlorofluorocarbons (CFC's) was phasedout under the 1987 Montreal Protocol, man-made climate change has the potential togreatly affect the ozone layer as well, not through ozone depletion but by influencing the movement of high-altitude winds, according to a recent study conducted by researchers at the University…
Scool Project Sails through the Northwest Passage

08.09.2009

The Northwest Passage, which links the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans along the northern coast of North America, was successfully crossed for the first time in 1906 by Roald Amundsen will be crossed again by Students' Cloud Observations On-Line (S'COOL).
Oil Drought Pushing Norway to Search for Oil in the Arctic

04.09.2009

A new report released by the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate shows a faster decline than initially expected in Norway's oil production, as the 123 million tons of oil equivalents from 2008 is expected to decline to 111 million in 2009.
Greenhouse Gases Overturn 2,000 Years of Natural Cooling

04.09.2009

A new study, led by Northern Arizona University and the National Centerfor Atmospheric Research (NCAR), shows Arctic temperatures in the1990's to have reached their warmest level in at least 2,000 years. The study, to be published in Science, shows that if it hadn't been foranthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, the Arctic…
New WWF Report Impacts of Warming Arctic More Dire than We Thought

03.09.2009

A new report from World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Arctic Climate Feedbacks: Global Implications, gives projections more ominous than previous projections such as those of the IPCC's 2007 Fourth Assessment Report. The unprecedented peer-reviewed report ibrought together topclimate scientists to assess the current science on Arctic warming.
Satellites and Submarines Examining Arctic Sea Ice Thickness

02.09.2009

This past summer, a group of students, accompanied by a Canadian senator, a writer, and a filmmaker joined scientists at Resoulte Bay on the icebreaker Louis S. St-Laurent on their journey to the Northwest Passage to get a firsthand look at the sea ice during a workshop designed to increase…
Inuit Hunting Techniques Helping Scientists

28.08.2009

In Qaanaaq, Greenland, about 850 miles away from the North Pole, an effort to tag narwhals for scientific research is currently underway. The project, which is supported by the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources and lead by Kristin Laidre, an oceanographer at the University of Washington, will use satellite tags…
Climate and Habitability

06.08.2009

Scientists from the NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Science (GISS) have been looking into shifts in climate and their consequences for the planet's environment and life. As greenhouse gas emissions and temperatures rise, impacts are being witnessed on physical and biological systems around the world: glaciers and permafrost are melting,…