In the gateway to the Arctic, fat, ice and polar bears are crucial. All three are in trouble Searching for polar bears where the Churchill River dumps into Canada’s massive Hudson Bay, biologist Geoff York scans a region that’s on a low fat, low ice diet because of climate change. And it’s getting lower on polar bears. A polar bear cub walks along rocks toward its mother, Wednesday, Aug. 7, 2024, near Churchill, Manitoba. (AP Photo/Joshua A. Bickel) There are now about 600 polar bears in the Western Hudson Bay, one of the most threatened of the 20 populations of the white beasts. That’s about half the number of 40 years ago, says York, senior director of research and policy at Polar Bears International. His latest study, with a team of scientists from various fields, shows tha...
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Ichthyosaurs were a successful group of marine reptiles that prospered during the age of dinosaurs, some reaching up to around 70 feet (21 meters) long - exceeded in size in the history of Earth's oceans only by the largest of the whales. But their origins have been a bit mysterious. Fossils dating to about 250 million years ago unearthed in a harsh and remote locale - Norway's Arctic island of Spitsbergen - are now providing surprising insight into the rise of ichthyosaurs. Researchers said they found remains of the earliest-known ichthyosaur, which lived approximately 2 million years after Earth's worst mass extinction that ended the Permian Period, wiping out roughly 90% of the planet's species amid massive Siberian volcanism. The 11 tail vertebrae discovered indicate that the an...
Read MoreAt 10:40 a.m. on a day in January, two powerful beams of light from the Svalbard governor’s boat pierced the complete darkness of the mountain-fringed fjord it was sailing. It was carrying the children’s choir from this remote village’s church to visit an even more isolated Arctic outpost. Spotlights from the governor's boat light the horizon during a journey from Longyearbyen to Barentsburg, Norway, Saturday, Jan. 7, 2023. It was carrying the children's choir from Longyearbyen's only church, Svalbard Kirke, to visit the even more isolated Arctic outpost of Barentsburg, which is run by a Russian mining company. (AP Photo/Daniel Cole) That’s polar night in this Norwegian archipelago – so close to the North Pole the sun is at least six degrees below the horizon from mid-November throu...
Read MoreAnalysis of observed temperatures finds two jumps over the past 50 years that were missed by most climate models A new analysis of observed temperatures shows the Arctic is heating up more than four times faster than the rate of global warming. The trend has stepped upward steeply twice in the last 50 years, a finding missed by all but four of 39 climate models. “Thirty years is considered the minimum to represent climate change,” said Petr Chylek, a physicist and climate researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory and lead author of the study in Geophysical Research Letters. “We decreased the time interval to 21 years. At that smaller time scale and, contrary to previous investigations that found the Arctic amplification index increases in a smooth way, we observed two distinct st...
Read MoreNorway’s state-owned coal company will close its last mine in the Arctic Svalbard archipelago in 2023, it said on Thursday, causing the loss of 80 jobs and ending 120 years of exploitation. While Store Norske Spitsbergen Kullkompani (SNSK) has shut its major mines in the islands over the past two decades, it had kept the smaller Mine 7 open, primarily to ensure supplies to a local coal-fired power plant, as well as some exports. FILE PHOTO: Low clouds are seen in the Kings Bay of Ny-Alesund, Svalbard, Norway, October 12, 2015. REUTERS/Anna Filipova The Arctic islands are warming faster than almost anywhere on Earth, highlighting the risks to fragile ecosystems from climate change, and Norway aims to cut its overall emissions, although it also remains a major oil and gas producer....
Read MoreWarming Arctic at the frontier of climate insight and risk, experts say
The environmental transformation happening in the Arctic is key to understanding the potential global impacts of climate change, an Alaska Native leader and a polar explorer told the Reuters Next conference on Monday. With climate change warming the Arctic twice as fast as the overall planet, newly possible commercial activities have also raised questions about responsibility and risk at the top of the world, an insurance expert said. FILE PHOTO: Greenpeace's Arctic Sunrise ship navigates through floating ice in the Arctic Ocean, September 15, 2020. Picture taken with a drone. REUTERS/Natalie Thomas/File Photo Native peoples’ observations of changes in the Arctic - such as diseases in fish, or shifts in the time of year when mountain snow melts - are key to understanding how clim...
Read MoreArctic warming cascades through ocean and over land Greenhouse gas emissions reached a new high last year, putting the world on track for an average temperature rise of 3 degrees Celsius, a U.N. report showed on Wednesday. The report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) - the latest to suggest the world is hurtling toward extreme climate change - follows a year of sobering weather extremes, including rapid ice loss in the Arctic as well as record heat waves and wildfires in Siberia and the U.S. West. On Monday, researchers at Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service said last month was the hottest-ever November on record. Meanwhile, The Arctic region has had its second-warmest year since 1900, continuing a pattern of extreme heat, ice melt and environmental transf...
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