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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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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Thawing Permafrost Also Releasing Nitrous Oxide into Atmosphere
07.04.2010
Nitrous oxide (N2O), which gets into the atmosphere from fertilizers used in agriculture or the use of fossil fuels, had been believed that while carbon dioxide and methane were released as permafrost melted, nitrous oxide remained in the permafrost. However according to a new study, the release of the powerful…
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Seafloor Sediment Cores from Wilkes Land Offer Insight into Past and Future Climates
19.02.2010
From onboard the JOIDES Resolution, a ship operated by the International Ocean Drilling Program (IODP), morethan 30 researchers from institutions including Stanford University have been drilling into the seafloor to collect sediments as old as 50 million years in an attempt to find clues about Earth's past climate.
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Limits of Permafrost in Northern Canada Pushed Back over 130 km in last 50 Years
18.02.2010
Over the course of the past 50 years, the limits of permafrost in the James Bay region of Canada have moved northwards by 130 kilometers, according to researchers from the Université Laval. A study, published in the scientific journal Permafrost and Periglacial Processes, their research suggests that permafrost in the…
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Canada and US to Map Arctic Seabed to Make Territorial Claims
15.02.2010
With predictions of an ice-free Arctic by 2030, Arctic countries such as Canada, the United States, Russia, Denmark and Norway have mounted studies with the hope to expand their seabed territory. An estimated 22% of the world’s untapped natural oil, natural gas and mineral resources can be found in the…
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Arctic Methane Emissions Reaching Record Levels
19.01.2010
On the heels of a string of reports on the methane emissions from the Arctic permafrost, a new study published in Science shows a massive spike in the amount of methane seeping from Arctic permafrost as it melts. As the study shows, methane emissions have risen by almost one-third in…
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Invading Trees Likely to Cause Increased Warming in the Arctic
13.01.2010
Trees seem to be slowly moving northward as the tundra in the Arctic melts. According to a study from University of California Berkley scientists published in the online Early Edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the northward expansion of the treeline (the northernmost point at…
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Arctic Changes Influenced Ice Age Global Climate Patterns
13.01.2010
An international study led by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is being published this week in Nature Geoscience. The study shows that water levels in the Bering Strait helped drive global climate patterns during ice ages dating back more than 100,000 years.
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Warm Mid-Pliocene a Warning for Today’s Warming Arctic
31.12.2009
Scientists from the US Geological Survey found that the Arctic Ocean and the Nordic Seas were too warm to support summer sea ice during the mid-Pliocene warm period (3.3 to 3 million years ago) in a study published in Stratigraphy.
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Melting Tundra to Lead to Increased Carbon Emissions in Arctic Ocean
30.12.2009
According to research conducted by the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, the release of organic material from the Arctic tundra as it thaws will ultimately result in additional carbon dioxide emissions.
