A new study shows the Arctic climate system may be more sensitive to greenhouse warming than previously thought, and that current levels of Earth’s atmospheric carbon dioxide may be high enough to bring about significant, irreversible shifts in Arctic ecosystems. Led by the University of Colorado at Boulder, the international study indicated that while the [...]

A critical minimum for Arctic sea ice can again be expected for late summer 2010, according to researchers. Scientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association (AWI) in Bremerhaven and from KlimaCampus of the University of Hamburg have now published data in this context in the annual issue [...]

Nature Geoscience Subject Category: Biogeochemistry Soil science: Arctic thaw Hermann F. Jungkunst is at the Institute of Geography, Landscape Ecology, University of Gottingen, Goldschmidtstrasse 5, D-37077 Gottingen, Germany. e-mail: hjungku@gwdg.de Abstract The organic matter stored in frozen Arctic soils could release significant quantities of carbon dioxide and methane on thawing. Now, laboratory experiments show that re-wetting of [...]

ANCHORAGE — An ambitious plan to drill for oil off the northwest coast of Alaska has been moving ahead despite the spill in the Gulf of Mexico, but the project is now facing new questions from federal regulators. Led by Shell Oil, the project has not been formally halted and could still begin exploratory drilling [...]

EVERYONE knows how much hotter it feels to wear a black T-shirt, rather than a white one, on a warm day. In the same way, the melting of sea ice in the Arctic, revealing the dark water below, has been shown by Australian scientists to be the main cause of unusually rapid warming at the [...]

In another display of the sea change that has occurred at the US Environmental Protection Agency under the current administration, a new report was issued yesterday regarding indicators of climate change. The report, entitled “Climate Change Indicators in the United States,” measures 24 separate indicators showing how climate change affects the health and environment of [...]

St. Petersburg, April 21 (IANS/RIA Novosti) Increasing amount of Organic materials dissolved in the Arctic Ocean may be an indication of global warming, scientists have said. The amount of organic materials dissolved in the Arctic Ocean has doubled over the last 12 years, which is possibly one more sign of global warming, Russian oceanographer Natalia [...]

Close to 50 years of data show the Devon Island ice cap, one of the largest ice masses in the Canadian High Arctic, is thinning and shrinking. A paper published in the March edition of Arctic, the journal of the University of Calgary’s Arctic Institute of North America, reports that between 1961 and 1985, the [...]

Recently a team from Russia, the US, and Sweden found that the East Siberian Arctic Shelf (ESAS) is releasing around 8 teragrams of methane from subsea sediments each year. Now team member Natalia Shakhova and colleague Dmitry Nicolsky have come up with a new model for the Dmitry Laptev Strait region of the shelf to explain exactly how [...]

For those who have read my book ZERO Greenhouse Emissions – The Day the Lights Went Out – Our Future World, the reports this week by the science community of the discovery of methane release from thawing methane clathrates from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf will come as little surprise. In chapter 9 Mother Natures [...]