Something Fishy in the Ancient Arctic

September 19th, 2011 | By Nora Sawyer | Filed in Arctic History, SCIENCE

The ancient arctic was nothing like the frozen north we know today. Warm, with subtropical conditions, its prehistoric waters might have appeared a little more inviting than the icy deeps we know today (though personally, we’re partial to the icy deep).

That is, until you get a load of what lurked beneath. The recent discovery of 375-million-year-old fish fossil on Ellesmere Island up in Nunavut reveals that the subtropical paradise was home to a large predatory fish. According to Live Science,

The lobe-finned fish, now called Laccognathus embryi, probably grew to about 5 or 6 feet long (1.5 to 1.8 meters) and had a wide head with small eyes and robust jaws lined with large piercing teeth. The beast was likely a bottom-dweller, waiting on the seafloor to lunge at prey passing by.

The Laccoganthus embryi, in addition to its intimidating jaws, was a lobe-finned fish, sporting what scientists believe might have been an early evolutionary stage in the development of limbs. Another transitional fish (believed to be the “missing link” between fish and land animals) was previously discovered in the same location, leading scientists to believe that they interacted, and even competed for food.

But for me, the takeaway is this: There are some amazing things lurking beneath Arctic waters. But luckily? The fossil record is as close as we’ll get to this.

Image credit: Jason Poole/ANSP
Read more over at Live Science

High Latitude Alert: “Super Charged” Northern Lights Tonight!

September 13th, 2011 | By Nora Sawyer | Filed in Current Events, IN THE NEWS, SCIENCE

Last week’s solar flares made for some fantastic aurora displays in the Northern Hemisphere. And according to Space.com, skywatchers in northern climates can expect more of the same, as intermittent geomagnetic storms stir things up once again.

The auroras are a fixture of Arctic nights, and can often make a spectacular backdrop to a night at camp, as seen in the photo above, from an AK expedition to Torngat.

But Arctic isn’t even the most extreme spot to view the auroras. Space.com reports that they’re visible from the International space station, as well.

This photo was taken last week by NASA astronaut Ron Garan:

I guess we’ll just have to content ourselves with having access to some of the best views on Earth.

Airships Over the Arctic

September 7th, 2011 | By Nora Sawyer | Filed in Current Events, IN THE NEWS, Mechanized Vehicles, TECHNOLOGY

In the popular imagination, the phrase ‘Arctic transport’ most likely conjures up images from another century: sleds pulled by teams of dogs, or ships locked in ice. But shipping companies are looking to another retro-seeming vehicle to revolutionize the future of Arctic air transport: The zeppelin.

For miners and others doing remote operations, the airships can save time and money by transporting up to 50 tonnes of cargo across Canada’s north — eliminating the need for heavy trucks and roads.  Plus, these ships are tough. The Vancouver Sun notes,

Airships today use a combination of lighter-than-air helium instead of hydrogen, a highly flammable gas, and they’re built with tough “space-age” fibres, like spectra, up to 10 times stronger than steel of equivalent weight.

Discovery Air Innovations hopes to roll out the airships, which will deliver freight at one-quarter the cost of other methods, by the year 2014. Even better, the airships will utilize “clean” energy to minimize the impact on the environment.

Read more:

Airships on their way to Canada’s North (Vancouver Sun)

Airships could prove a lifeline in the Arctic (Wired)

Tsunami Separates Ice from Antarctica

August 12th, 2011 | By Tristan Crane | Filed in Current Events, IN THE NEWS

This dramatic time-lapse video from NASA clearly shows the impact the recent tsunami which so tragically affected Japan had on the Sulzberger Ice Shelf in Antarctica.

Challenges To Arctic Drilling

August 10th, 2011 | By Tristan Crane | Filed in Current Events, IN THE NEWS

There’s a great op-ed piece up at the New York Times by writer Clifford Krauss speculating on the future of arctic drilling, now that Shell Oil has been granted conditional approval for its plan to drill in the Beauford Sea off the North Slope of Alaska.

Last year, drilling appeared to be on track until an E.P.A. appeals panel delayed an air quality permit because it wanted more time to consider the potential impact of exploration rigs’ diesel emissions on local indigenous communities. Shell decided six months ago to put off drilling until 2012, fearing it would not have time to get equipment in place for the summer drilling season.

Complicating the political calculus was last year’s deadly accident and oil spill at a BP well in the Gulf of Mexico.

The entire piece is well worth a read, it sums up the current situation nicely and suggests a number of challenges oil companies will face, including from conservation and environmental groups.

Marine Life Crossing The Northwest Passage

August 8th, 2011 | By Tristan Crane | Filed in Current Events, IN THE NEWS

With seasonal melts comes access to shipping lanes generally frozen over, but as the seas warm a newer trend is emerging. Sea life including fish, whales, and microscopic plankton is also taking advantage of open routes to venture into areas previously unexplored.

The Globe and Mail reports -

“The implications are enormous. It’s a threshold that has been crossed,” said Philip C. Reid, of the Alister Hardy Foundation for Ocean Science in Plymouth, England.

Mr. Reid said the last time the world witnessed such a major incursion from the Pacific was 2 million years ago, which had “a huge impact on the North Atlantic,” driving some species to extinction as the newcomers dominated the competition for food.

Mr. Reid’s study of plankton and the research on the whale, co-authored by Aviad Scheinin of the Israel Marine Mammal Research and Assistance Center, are among nearly 300 scientific papers written over the last 13 years that are being synthesized and published this year by Project Clamer, a collaboration of 17 institutes on climate change and the oceans.

Iceberg Season In Newfoundland

July 29th, 2011 | By Tristan Crane | 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 Tristan Crane | 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 Tristan Crane | 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 Tristan Crane | 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.