The Russian Ministry of Transport has prepared a bill, which is to regulate commercial shipping along the Northern Sea Route.
The bill describes the waters of the Northern Sea Route and lays down principles for operations along the route, a ministry spokesman told Regnum.
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The next few years will provide new possibilities in the High North believes newly elected President of the Norwegian Shipowners' Association Thor Jørgen Guttormsen.
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Australian and US scientists have discovered how changes in winds blowing on the Southern Ocean drive variations in the depth of the surface layer of sea water responsible for regulating exchanges of heat and carbon dioxide between the ocean and the atmosphere.
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In a paper in the journal Science, published on 5 March, researchers from Russia, Sweden and the USA reported their results from 5000 at-sea measurements of dissolved methane in the coastal waters off of Eastern Siberia. They showed that most of the bottom waters and more than half of the surface waters of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf contained supersaturations of methane - a supersaturation represents more methane than expected and indicates a source other than the atmosphere. They determined that the methane entered the ocean waters from below, from the large reserviors of methane and other carbon in the sub-sea permafrost.
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In the far northern reaches of the Arctic, day versus night often doesn't mean a whole lot. During parts of the year, the sun does not set; at other times, it's just the opposite. A new study reported online on March 11th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, shows that Arctic reindeer have come up with a solution to living under those extreme conditions: They've abandoned use of the internal clock that drives the daily biological rhythms in other organisms.
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-We are working within the frames of the rules formulated by the United Nations, on the basis of international law, Putin said yesterday about his country’s policies towards the Arctic. He maintained that there lately has been too much noise around studies of the Arctic.
Talking to the board of the Russian Geographical Society yesterday, Putin said that the Russian flag planting on the North Pole sea bed had arisen “much noise” among the country’s neighbors. He maintained that the reactions on the flag planting had been “absolutely unfounded”.
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Levels of the main greenhouse gas in the atmosphere have risen to new highs in 2010 despite an economic slowdown in many nations that braked industrial output, data showed on Monday.
Carbon dioxide, measured at Norway's Zeppelin station on the Arctic Svalbard archipelago, rose to a median 393.71 parts per million of the atmosphere in the first two weeks of March from 393.17 in the same period of 2009, extending years of gains.
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Within the European research project RECONCILE the Russian high-flying research aircraft M55 Geophysica landed in Longyearbyen, Svalbard. It was the first time that this special aircraft went this far north. This mission was part of a 6-week measurement campaign based in Kiruna, Sweden.
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The Svalbard “Doomsday” Global Seed Vault is surpassing 500,000 samples to become the most diverse collection of food seeds in history.
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A dimming of the sun to match conditions in the "Little Ice Age" of the 17th century would only slightly slow global warming, a study indicated on Wednesday.
A weakening of solar activity in recent years, linked to fewer sunspots, would cut at most 0.3 degree Celsius (0.5 F) from a projected rise in temperatures by 2100 if it becomes a long-lasting "Grand Minimum" of brightness, they said.
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Climate change is here and scientists need to do a better job of explaining it to the public, the director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Friday. We are no longer constrained by talking about some possible future. Climate change is happening now and it's happening in people's back yards," Jane Lubchenco told reporters at a briefing. "Scientists have seriously underestimated the importance of explaining what we know about climate in a way people can understand," she said.
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Russia’s First Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov is appointed new Head of the Governmental Commission for Russian presence on Svalbard.
Zubkov takes over the post after another First Deputy Prime Minister, Igor Shuvalov.
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China formally signed up on Tuesday for the climate accord struck at the Copenhagen summit, the last major emerging economy to endorse a plan strongly favoured by the United States.
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A three-year field program now underway is measuring carbon distributions and primary productivity in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean to help scientists worldwide determine the impacts of a changing climate on ocean biology and biogeochemistry. The study, Climate Variability on the East Coast (CliVEC), will also help validate ocean color satellite measurements and refine biogeochemistry models of ocean processes.
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Each year Svalbard Science Forum and the Norwegian Polar Institute designate funds to selected Master students, PhD students and researchers associated with Norwegian institutions for fieldwork in Svalbard. The intention of the fund is to support researchers and students carrying out fieldwork in Svalbard with an emphasis on those that are new to Svalbard. The scholarship is allocated yearly and the next application deadline will be announced in late summer/early autumn 2010.
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Since 2004, University at Buffalo anthropologist Ezra Zubrow has worked intensively with teams of scientists in the Arctic regions of St. James Bay, Quebec, northern Finland and Kamchatka to understand how humans living 4,000 to 6,000 years ago reacted to climate changes.
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The recently observed reduction in air pollution implies that more solar radiation reaches the Earth's surface. This could lead to a far more rapid increase in the Earth's temperature in the coming decades than has previously been expected based on calculations of CO2 emissions alone.
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The general aim of the ColdWear project at SINTEF is to gather physiological data on how we react to cold. These data will give scientists the expertise they need to develop what they call "advanced protection" for persons who operate in our most severe climate zones, such as Siberia and the Arctic.
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SSF and SMS have jointly organized a workshop that aimed at exchange of information and finding solutions for accessing and carrying out future research in the least accessible, and the most logistically demanding places in Svalbard - the East.
East Svalbard is indispensable as reference area. Its importance for monitoring climate change in the Arctic through reference-based research cannot be underestimated e.g. the changes in weather patterns are first visible in the east and should be captured already there.
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A section of the Arctic Ocean seafloor that holds vast stores of frozen methane is showing signs of instability and widespread venting of the powerful greenhouse gas, according to the findings of an international research team led by University of Alaska Fairbanks scientists Natalia Shakhova and Igor Semiletov.
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The ongoing El Niño of 2010 is affecting north Pacific Ocean ecosystems in ways that could affect the West Coast fishing industry, according to scientists at NOAA and Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego.
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Content:
1) Oslo Science Conference
2) Polar Week - 15 to 19 March 2010
3) IPY Publications Database
4) IPY International Field School in Svalbard, 21 June to 9 July 2010
5) Call for proposals for International Teams in Space Science
6) APECS Update
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The beasts had long lain extinct and forgotten, embedded deep in the frozen turf, bodies swaddled in Earth's layers for thousands of years before Christ.
Now, the Russian permafrost is offering up the bones and tusks of the woolly mammoths that once lumbered over the tundra. They are shaped into picture frames, chess sets, pendants. They are gathered and piled, carved and whittled, bought and sold on the Internet.
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Scientists at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory have found evidence of hydrothermal vents on the seafloor near Antarctica, formerly a blank spot on the map for researchers wanting to learn more about seafloor formation and the bizarre life forms drawn to these extreme environments.
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Skepticism about climate change is going mainstream, and that is worrying. One-third of Americans now say global warming doesn’t exist – triple the percentage of three years ago.
This defiance of science isn’t just harmful for the environment. It’s also distracting us from growing threats to US national security. Actual – not theoretical – effects of climate change are turning the Arctic into a potential military flash point.
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Margit Dyrland has worked on observations of temperature and airglow changes in upper atmosphere/mesosphere trying to find a key to weather and climate variability. Combination of several methods was used and she has found relationships between various climate elements, fully described in her PhD thesis.
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A large space rock may have exploded over Antarctica thousands of years ago, showering a large area with debris, according to new research.
The evidence comes from accumulations of tiny meteoritic particles and a layer of extraterrestrial dust found in Antarctic ice cores.
Details of the work were presented at a major science conference in Texas.
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China is starting to prepare for the commercial and strategic opportunities arising as global warming melts the polar ice cover in the Arctic, an international peace research group said Monday.
Researchers expect the North Pole to be ice free during summer months in a matter of decades, opening up new shipping lanes and potential resource exploration in an area believed to contain as much as a quarter of the world's undiscovered oil and gas.
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The latest findings from research on Antarctica's rich marine life are presented this week at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Marine Biologist Huw Griffiths from British Antarctic Survey (BAS) is involved in a major international investigation into the distribution and abundance of Antarctica's vast marine biodiversity -- the Census of Antarctic Marine Life (CAML).
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The same antifreeze proteins that keep organisms from freezing in cold environments also can prevent ice from melting at warmer temperatures, according to a new Ohio University and Queen's University study published today in the Early Edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Climactic changes might currently be threatening the survival of polar bears (Ursus maritimus), but similar shifts appear to have played an important part in bringing the species into existence in the not too distant past.
Researchers announced today that they have sequenced the mitochondrial genome of an ancient polar bear. The genetic traces they found in the bear's 110,000- to 130,000-year-old jawbone reveal that the species likely split from brown bears (U. arctos) just 150,000 years ago, at a time when specializing in arctic living quickly became an advantage rather than a liability.
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