Every year, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies analyzes data on global temperatures. This past year was one of the warmest on record, tying for second place, while the decade between 2000 -2009 was found to be the warmest on record.

NASA has posted a collection of articles, photographs, and videos exploring what climate change means for the earth, including the video above. Check the link for more images of climate change as seen from space, answers to common misconceptions about climate change, and other resources on the changes taking place across the globe.

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Last week, I posted a link to an article about Ann Daniels, one of the Arctic explorers heading to the North Pole as part of the Catlin Arctic Survey.

In this week’s Guardian, John Crace looks into the training Daniels and her fellow expedition members Martin Hartley and Charlie Paton endure before they can tackle the pole. Crace paints a vivid picture:

Six am on a sub-zero morning in Devon. A five-mile run in the dark, ending in a couple of hill sprints. Breakfast. Circuit training in the barn; beyond any pain threshold to physical exhaustion. Lunch. Ninety minutes dragging weighted tyres up and down a 1:6 hill. The only upside is that the mud has frozen over. It’s mindless, repetitive, punishing effort, not improved by an ex-marine shouting in your ear. Tea. A three-mile run, followed by more circuits. Die

The article also creates a nuanced and detailed portrait of the explorers. One thing that struck me while I was reading, I was struck by how normal — and simultaneously how extraordinary — the explorers are. Everyday people, not superhuman, not Olympic athletes, aging (45 now, for God’s sake,” as Daniels readily admits), they tackle the pole, year after year, gathering data and working to mitigate climate change. Everyday heroes, exploring the Arctic.

Trial by ice – what it takes to be an Arctic explorer | Environment | The Guardian.

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The jawbone of a fully grown male polar bear, believed to be somewhere between 110,000 and 130,000 years old, is giving scientists a rare glimpse into polar bear evolution.

Polar Bears: Younger than they look

DNA from the jawbone, which was discovered in Svalbard by researcher Olafur Ingolfsson of the University of Iceland in 2004, shows that polar bears are a relatively young species, having split from brown bears approximately 150,000 years ago and evolved rapidly during the climate changes that took place during the late Pleistocene. As Ingolfsson notes, in an email quoted on the New York Times’ Dot Earth blog,

I think our find shows that polar bears have been around for a while, and they probably have survived situations in the past where the Arctic was warmer and there was less seasonal sea ice than today. . .

I want to stress that we should be concerned about the polar bears’ future. There are other risks out there, mainly from chemical pollution of the Arctic (heavy metals, pcbs, etc). Also, increased traffic (oil tankers) when/if ship lanes open up across the Arctic Ocean could constitute a major threat.

Polar bear fossils are rare, as the animals spend most of their lives on the sea ice, which means that their remains rarely end up on land. The DNA taken from the jawbone gives researchers a rare glimpse into the lives of ancient polar bears. It is also the oldest mitochondrial sample from a mammal sequenced to date.

Read more:

Science Daily: Ancient DNA from rare fossil reveals that polar bears evolved recently and adapted quickly

Arctic Update: Resilient Bears, Shrinking Ice — Dot Earth Blog, NY Times.com

Unis: Oldest remains of a polar bear ever discovered.

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A Polar Bear Watches as an Arctic Kingdom Expedition Traverses Hudson Bay

Today on Talk of the Nation, researcher Robert Rockwell reported on the incursion of grizzly bears into the area around Hudson Bay, an area formerly the exclusive territory of polar bears.

The two bears are actually fairly close relatives — close enough to produce hybrid young, though those young are sterile. The two predators can co-exist fairly peacefully as well, since both, as top level predators, have evolved not to fight too much with other bears. This is because the bears can do so much damage to one another that infighting would would cause too much damage amongst the population — bears that fought each other regularly would have died out long ago.

At the same time, however, grizzlies create competition for the polar bears, and may even hibernate in the dens where polar bear mothers bear their young, threatening a new generation of polar bears.

Both species are federally protected in Canada, and it isn’t yet clear whether the grizzlies plan to stay in Hudson Bay. But for researchers, this is both an interesting and concerning development in the Hudson Bay ecosystem.

Read more:

Grizzlies Move Into Polar Bear Turf On Hudson Bay : NPR.

Science Daily: Grizzly Bears Move Into Polar Bear Habitat in Manitoba, Canada

Arctic Kingdom Expeditions to Hudson Bay

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An Arctic Kingdom Diver Enjoys a Relatively Warm Summer Swim

Today on CNN, there’s an article up about Ann Daniels, a widely respected polar explorer (and British mother-of-four) who is embarking this week on a 500-kilometer trek up the Canadian sea ice toward the North Pole, part of the 2010 Catlin Arctic Survey.

On the way, Daniels and her team will be taking water samples and other field data on the changing Arctic climate, providing raw data for scientists studying the state of the Arctic today. This year’s survey will focus on ocean acidification as increasing levels of carbon dioxide are absorbed from the atmosphere.

Another side affect of climate change is an decrease in sea ice, and a corresponding increase in the amount of swimming Daniels and her team will have to do — through cold, dark water. And swimming in the Arctic winter sea, Daniels notes, is no easy task. Along with the cold, there’s the psychological element to swimming in the winter dark:

“Nothing from under the sea is going to jump up and eat you. But as a human being there’s that feeling of, ‘what is under here? It’s pitch black and anything can get me.’ Mentally you start imagining all kinds of things in the water,” she said from her home in Devon, southwest England.

Daniels notes that, in the 13 years since she started making regular trips to the pole, the amount of swimming has increased.

The first time I swam was in 2002 and steadily we’ve had to swim more and more as the years go on, and we’re certainly expecting this year to do an awful lot of swimming. We’ve got a flotation device to go around the sledge as well because we’re expecting more water than ever before.”

via Arctic explorer prepares for icy swim – CNN.com.

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I just got back from Vancouver, a city abuzz with talk next month’s winter Olympics (and the hopes that it will snow in time and spring will stop its early springing!). On my way home, I opened up my in-flight magazine to find  this interesting article on the climate change research currently going on in Svalbard, Norway’s high arctic archipelago.

The article details some of the research going on in Svalbard.

For this Arctic outpost, all the science is about looking ahead. After a century wresting coal from its stratified geology, near-pristine Svalbard is seeing a new light at the end of the mineshaft. Old reptile knuckles form part of that vision. Sure, commercial mining is still the breadwinner for the islands’ 2,100 inhabitants, and Longyearbyen, the archipelago’s “capital,” is heated with coal scooped out from Mine 7 at the end of the road just east of town. But scientific sleuthing (like fossil hunts, research into CO2 capture and storage and university courses in polar ecology) accounts for an ever-larger chunk of Svalbard’s revamped economy, along with welcoming tourists hoping to immortalize a member of the 3,000-strong polar bear family. Longyearbyen made front-page news two years ago when the Svalbard Global Seed Vaultswung open its brushed steel door to 4.5 million food-crop seed samples. And in September, Ny-Ålesund, an international research base some 100 kilometres northwest of Longyearbyen, stole the spotlight when UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon dropped in to see the effects of climate change and to hear from the climate detectives working there. With all this science, Svalbard is a living lab.

The Arctic is home to some cutting-edge science, particularly on the subject of climate change. In Svalbard, some researchers are even exploring the possibility of preserving the Arctic utilizing ice-making bacteria, which can create ice at temperatures slightly above freezing. Here, in one the areas most threatened by global warming, scientists are working towards solutions that could salvage not only the Arctic, but the global climate at large. Writer Susan Nerberg explains:

When we reach the atmospheric research station close to the summit, the microbiologists from the University of East London check their equipment: a vacuum cleaner and a strip of tape mounted to capture airborne particles that might contain ice-making bacteria. “Pure water doesn’t freeze until the temperature drops to -36.5ºC,” says Moffett. (I wonder if my old science teacher knows that.) “But some micro-organisms can produce ice at temperatures as high as -1ºC.” While this discovery is already used to create artificial snow and to preserve food, the two scientists’ main interest is the potential for weather modification. The idea is that you sprinkle bacterial protein (not live bacteria) into the air, creating ice crystals and, subsequently, clouds and rain. As Henderson-Begg explains it, “Clouds high in the atmosphere trap solar radiation, warming the planet. Low clouds reflect solar heat, keeping the planet cool. If we could modify clouds, we could prevent global warming.”

The next day, I head out with University of Sheffield plant ecologist Gareth Phoenix to collect moss campion. We hike across a delta created by glacial runoff, hopping from stone to stone in a futile attempt not to dunk our feet, until we reach a spot where the wildflower grows. The moss campion and other plants, like the polar willow, which reaches a grand height of three centimetres, will shed light on how the Arctic copes with pollution carried here from Europe. On our way back, a chubby Svalbard reindeer jogging across the moraine makes me think about the potential of the sci-fi ice bugs. It’s almost as if Phoenix had read my mind. “Svalbard is so spectacular, it makes you feel really insignificant as a human being and even more desperate to protect such a place,” he tells me. “Planet Earth has only one Arctic. It would be nice to keep it as it is.”

An Arctic Kingdom Expedition to Svalbard

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While those of us in the parts of the Northern Hemisphere below the Arctic Circle have been enjoying unusually cold weather, life above the treeline has been unseasonably warm.

While much of the Northern Hemisphere has shivered in a cold snap in recent weeks, temperatures in the Arctic soared to unusually high levels, U.S. scientists reported. This strange atmospheric pattern is caused by natural variability and not by rising levels of greenhouse gases. However, it could affect Arctic ice which in turn may impact global warming, said Mark Serreze, director of the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado.

“It’s very warm over the Arctic, with air temperatures locally at 10 to 15 degrees F (5.6 to 8.4 degrees C) warmer than they should be in certain areas,” Serreze said in a telephone interview on Monday. This contrasts with record or near-record cold over much of the eastern United States and Canada, Europe and Asia for the last two weeks of December and the first days of January, the data center reported.

While much of the Northern Hemisphere has shivered in a cold snap in recent weeks, temperatures in the Arctic soared to unusually high levels, U.S. scientists reported. This strange atmospheric pattern is caused by natural variability and not by rising levels of greenhouse gases. However, it could affect Arctic ice which in turn may impact global warming, said Mark Serreze, director of the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado.

“It’s very warm over the Arctic, with air temperatures locally at 10 to 15 degrees F (5.6 to 8.4 degrees C) warmer than they should be in certain areas,” Serreze said in a telephone interview on Monday. This contrasts with record or near-record cold over much of the eastern United States and Canada, Europe and Asia for the last two weeks of December and the first days of January, the data center reported.

It’s due to a large area of high pressure over the Arctic, and a big area of low pressure at the mid-latitudes, where much of the Northern Hemisphere’s population is concentrated. Usually these areas of differing air pressure would shift and mix in a phenomenon known as the Arctic oscillation. Instead, they’ve remained stationary in what scientists term a negative phase of the oscillation. A positive phase would have low pressure over the Arctic and high pressure over the mid-latitudes.

World Environment News – Unusual Arctic Warmth As North Hemisphere Shivers – Planet Ark.

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Recent research indicates that the Arctic tern, which breeds in the Arctic in the summertime before flying south to ‘winter’ in the Antarctic during the southern hemisphere’s summer months, flies further than previously believed.

In previous years, scientists had only been able to track individual sea birds as far as the coast of South Africa before losing track of them, making it impossible to determine how far an individual bird or flock trekked in the course of a year.

An article published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America describes how a team of researchers led by Dr. Carsten Egevang of the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources in Nuuk used miniature geolocators to track eleven terns from colonies in Iceland and Greenland as they made their annual migration. The new data showed that some of the birds flew more than 50,000 miles in one year, taking a more meandering route than scientists had suspected.

Over the course of one bird’s 34-year life span, this commute adds up to a total of 2.4 million km , the equivalent of three journeys to the moon and back.

50,000-mile round trip makes Arctic tern the ultimate commuter – Times Online .

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Around the northern hemisphere, daredevils are celebrating the new year by taking a dip in ice-cold winter waters. Known as “polar bear plunges,” these celebrations embrace the new year’s cold, invigorating participants and allowing bystanders to appreciate anew their relative warmness.

Luckily for the ursus maritimus, polar bears in the wild are much more able to withstand the cold and wet, their bodies uniquely adapted to frigid northern waters with hair that traps the sun’s heat and repels water.

However, because they are so well-adapted to the arctic climate, polar bears are among the arctic animals most threatened by climate change. In the coming year, let’s all try for a little solidarity with these arctic giants. Ice-water baths optional.

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