Iceberg Season In Newfoundland

July 29th, 2011 | By Thomas Lennartz | Filed in Current Events, IN THE NEWS

Last August, a huge 260 square kilometer piece of ice has split off from Greenland’s Petermann Glacier. Since then, this floating island has broken into smaller – still very impressive – pieces, and is now creating quite a stir with people interested in viewing the icebergs.

The Huffington Post reports -

Sara Weitkamp, a marine science technician with the U.S. Coast Guard, flew over the ice island Tuesday as part of the International Ice Patrol. She has completed 19 other similar missions.

“It’s definitely the biggest piece of ice I’ve seen in my history of patrolling over the ocean,” she said in an interview.

“There’s a bunch of melt ponds and rivers that have started on it, just from the deterioration of it.

“It’s amazing to think that something that big has lasted that long, down in an area that we patrol where we’re used to seeing much smaller icebergs.”

The Record.com has some first-person coverage from folks out viewing the site -

“I’ve seen icebergs before but this was unreal. It looked like something that shouldn’t be there,” the 52-year-old fisher said Monday from his home in Port Hope Simpson, Labrador.

In utter silence, what looked like a floating ice city sat in front of Burden and his sons, a dazzling white ice island five kilometres long and alive with mountains, valleys, brooks, waterfalls, ponds and seals.

The ice has traveled quite far, from the Labrador region (known as a high traffic iceberg area) down to Newfoundland.

CBC radio has a great interview with fisherman Brian Kippenhuck, a crewmember on the boat ‘Labrador Quest’, describing his encounter with this enormous piece of ice about a hundred kilometres off Black Tickle, Labrador.

The Longest Polar Bear Swim Recorded

July 27th, 2011 | By Thomas Lennartz | Filed in Arctic Animals, SCIENCE

This story is both sad and triumphant, National Geographic reports that the longest polar bear swim recorded has topped out at 426 miles.

“We’re pretty sure that these animals didn’t have to do these long swims before, because 687-kilometer stretches of open water didn’t occur very often in the evolutionary history of the polar bear,” said study co-author Steven Amstrup, chief scientist for the conservation group Polar Bears International. Amstrup is also the former project leader of polar bear research for the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), which led the new study.

Another female bear in the study swam for more than 12 days, but appears to have found places to rest during her journey.

Photographer Florian Schulz’s Arctic Vision

July 25th, 2011 | By Thomas Lennartz | Filed in Art, IN THE NEWS

National Geographic is featuring some incredible images of polar bears by photographer Florian Schulz, alongside a story by Susan McGrath. View it online on their website, along with this great behind the scenes video of how the images were shot.

Florian Schulz is not only a renowned photographer who’s traveled with Arctic Kingdom several times in the past (on our Floe Edge safari as well as an excursion to Baffin Island); he’s an outspoken conservationist who shares his work online at his personal site as well as through videos like the one below…

NASA’s Icescape Mission

July 22nd, 2011 | By Thomas Lennartz | Filed in Current Events, Global Warming, IN THE NEWS, SCIENCE

'Ponds on the Ocean' photograph by Kathryn Hansen, via NASA Goddard on Flickr, under Creative Commons

This photo was created by Kathryn Hanson, currently on the ICESCAPE mission, gathering scientific data on the impacts of climate change.

From the caption by Mike Carlowicz -

If you have never been north of the Arctic Circle, it is easy to imagine that the “ice cap” at the top of the world is a uniform sheet of white. The reality, particularly during the spring and summer melt, is a mottled landscape of white, teal, slate gray, green, and navy.

The sea ice atop the Arctic Ocean can—as shown in this photograph from July 12, 2011—look more like swiss cheese or a bright coastal wetland. As ice melts, the liquid water collects in depressions on the surface and deepens them, forming melt ponds. These fresh water ponds are separated from the salty sea below and around it, until breaks in the ice merge the two.

Researchers on the NASA-funded ICESCAPE mission—Impacts of Climate on Ecosystems and Chemistry of the Arctic Pacific Environment—have been examining melt ponds, the ice around them, and the waters below for three weeks, with three more to go. Carried by the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Healy, a team of oceanographers, marine biologists, and glaciologists are investigating how changing conditions in the Arctic affect the ocean’s chemical and biological makeup.

The science team collects water samples to examine water chemistry and to observe the colonies of plankton growing in the water and on the surfaces of the ice. Other instruments are used to assess how much and how far sunlight is penetrating into—and warming—the Arctic Ocean. Still others are measuring the current systems that move water from the depths to the surface, as well as horizontally across the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas.

Impacts of Climate change on the Eco-Systems and Chemistry of the Arctic Pacific Environment (ICESCAPE) is a multi-year NASA shipborne project. The bulk of the research will take place in the Beaufort and Chukchi Sea’s in the summers of 2010 and 2011.

From the project home page -

The Arctic sea ice cover is in decline. The retreat of the summer ice cover, a general thinning, and a transition to a younger, a more vulnerable ice pack have been well documented. Melt seasons are starting earlier and lasting longer. These changes can profoundly impact the physical, biological, and geochemical state of the Arctic Ocean region. Climate models project that changes in the ice cover may accelerate in the future, with a possible transition to ice free summers later this century. These changes are quite pronounced in the Chukchi and Beaufort Sea and have consequences for the Arctic Ocean ecosystem, potentially affecting everything from sea ice algae to polar bears.

The central science question of this program is, “What is the impact of climate change (natural and anthropogenic) on the biogeochemistry and ecology of the Chukchi and Beaufort seas?” While both of these regions are experiencing significant changes in the ice cover, their biogeochemical response will likely be quite different due to their distinct physical, chemical, and biological differences.

Mosaic of the Arctic

July 20th, 2011 | By Thomas Lennartz | Filed in IN THE NEWS, SCIENCE

Another stunning example of Arctic photography from space, via the NASA Goddard Space Center.

On June 30, 2011 the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard NASA’s Terra satellite made multiple passes over the Arctic, capturing a true-color image of the summer lands and sea-ice near the North Pole on each pass. Individual images were then pieced together to create a large mosaic of the area, which gives a broader, circumpolar, view that would not be possible with individual images.

In this mosaic of the Arctic, the polar ice cap appears blue-white, while the ice covering land appears bright white. The ice of Greenland, in the lower left (southwest), is especially bright. Clouds also appear bright white, and can be difficult to separate from ice in true-color images. Most of the clouds in this image appear in billowing swirls, while ice tends to be smoother. This can only be confirmed in the false-color images that were also generated by MODIS that same day.

The North Pole is found northeast off the coast of Greenland, in the middle of the ice-covered Arctic Ocean and roughly near the center of this image. This is the northernmost point on Earth, and defines the geodectic latitude of 90 degrees north. From the North Pole, all directions are south.

Arctic Kingdom Featured In The National Post

July 19th, 2011 | By Thomas Lennartz | Filed in AK NEWS, Photographers, TRIPS

Don’t miss this terrific article on Arctic Kingdom from today’s National Post -

“Did you get it?” Michelle Valberg yells. “Oh my gosh, he’s right there!”

Ms. Valberg is calling from a satellite phone on Arctic Bay, an Inuit hamlet on Baffin Island in Nunavut, and the professional photographer has just spotted a Narwhal whale.

“Narwhals are swimming in a calm pool with an iceberg beside us, there’s nothing for miles and miles and we have mountains behind us,” she says, adding she just uploaded a photo of a polar bear she spotted to Facebook.

Ms. Valberg – who is from Ottawa and is working on a book on the North – along with a handful of other photographers – are part of an expedition organized by Arctic Kingdom Polar Expeditions Inc. The Toronto-based company facilitates logistics for everything from tourist trips to 50-person film crews, all in the North: from James Bay to the North Pole and from Alaska to Svalbard in Arctic Norway.

The trips are a decided step above winter camping though, with generators and cook tents, cots to sleep on and even Internet access.

“We specialize in making the places where people need to be accessible,” says Graham Dickson, chief “expedition” officer, who founded the company in 1999.

Michelle Valberg, interviewed for this piece has posted the photos mentioned to our Facebook page. Thanks Michelle!

A few other papers have picked up this story as well, check it out on the Montreal Gazette, and the Vancouver Sun.

Arctic Fox Pups At The Aquarium of the Pacific

July 19th, 2011 | By Thomas Lennartz | Filed in IN THE NEWS

Via. Zooborns –

Arctic fox babies are called either pups or kits. A litter usually has about seven kits but may contain up to fifteen. The Arctic fox is an incredibly resilient animal that can live in temperatures as low as -59° F and as warm as temperatures we experience in Southern California. They are found in the Arctic and alpine tundra regions, from coastal Alaska and Greenland to Scandinavia and Russia.

Photo by The Aquarium Of The Pacific

The Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, Californa welcomes two new (and extremely adorable) six week old arctic fox pups. The fox pups are part of their ominously titled ‘Arctic and Antarctica: Our polar Regions in Peril‘ exhibit.

Special Exhibits, Canadian Arctic Exploration

July 18th, 2011 | By Thomas Lennartz | Filed in Art, IN THE NEWS

A special exhibit is currently showing at the Canadian Museum of Civilization on The Canadian Arctic Expedition of 1913–1918. This exhibit, presented in collaboration with the Canadian Museum of Nature, covers not only the broad adventure, but paints a day to day picture of what life was like on an early arctic expedition.

For those of us geographically unable to make a visit in person, there is also this wonderful virtual exhibit - Northern People, Northern Knowledge.

From The Field, Viewing Polar Bears

July 14th, 2011 | By Thomas Lennartz | Filed in AK PRODUCTS & SERVICES, TRIPS

While visiting our polar bear cabins south of Arviat today, we saw three polar bears in 20 min, including this swimming polar bear from our boat. You can see the polar bear cabins on the horizon. Looking forward to seeing more polar bears here in November on the Arviat Fly-in Polar Bear Cabins trip.