Inspired by yesterday’s post, this week’s new content on Flickr features some of our Ice Diving photos from the last few years.

Tom with the harpoon he found on a dive last year.

Divers beneath the ice.

A team prepares to dive.

Visit our Flickr page for photos of ice diving, dog sledding, ballooning and more. And if you’d like to read about how Tom found the harpoon in the top photo, that’s #8 on his Top Ten Floe Edge Moments from 2009!

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All this week, VBC will be posting an online documentary about Heimo Korth, one of the last remaining residents of America’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Established in 1980 by then-president Jimmy Carter, the Refuge protects 19 million acres of Arctic wilderness from developers, hunters, and oil interests. The family followed by the documentary are the last white settlers to live on the land year round, one of six families that were grandfathered in when the park was formed.

The documentary explores the day-to-day realities of their lives, showcasing the skills and resilience needed to survive at the edge of the habitable world.

Parts One and Two are already online, with the rest posting throughout the week.

via Online documentary about one of the last people living in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Boing Boing.

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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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Over at the Circumpolar Blog, George Lessard recently posted a video:

via Circumpolar Blog: Inuit Drum Song ;Arctic Bay, Nunavut, Canada.

The two girls in the video are singing a traditional melody, accompanied by a man playing a qilaut, or wind drum, made of stretched caribou skin.

Curious about the qilaut, I did some more research and came across another video this time played by Angaangaq Lyberth, an Inuit elder from Greenland.

Accompanying the video is a description of the instrument:

Qilaut, the Eskimo Wind Drum, is a circle that has no beginning nor ending, in which we all belong.

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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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Igloolik, October 2006. Photo by Louise Murray.

Today marks the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. In Fairbanks, Alaska, the sun will rise at 10:49 AM and set 3 hours, 41 minutes, and 20 seconds later. Further north, the sun won’t rise at all. The North Pole hasn’t seen any sun since October.

But this, the darkest day, marks the sun’s eventual return. From here, the days start getting longer, until finally in February or March even the northernmost Arctic regions will begin to see sunlight again.

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A 160-year-old can of soup has yielded insight into the fate of Franklin’s 19th-century quest for Canada’s Northwest Passage:

High lead levels in both the soup and its container were detected by McMaster experts in experiments using X-ray fluorescence, a non-destructive method of analyzing objects that’s available at only two laboratories in Canada.

“The numbers showed us lead levels that were pretty much off the scale,” Fiona McNeill, a medical science and radiation expert, said in a statement after tests Tuesday on the can’s lid.

“It was an instantaneous test. We had already tested the soup found in the can and found high levels of lead, so we were certain we were going to find similar levels in the sealing solder.”

Lead poisoning has been cited as a major factor in the deaths of Franklin and his crewmen, who died while stranded in the Canadian Arctic. Bone tests on skeletons recovered from grave sites in the Arctic in the 1990s revealed dangerously high levels of lead, leading scientists to suspect that contaminated food lead to impaired judgment and poor health among Franklin and his crew.

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Barring a colder fall, residents of Arviat, Nunavut may find themselves confronting a larger-than-normal polar bear population. The CBC reports:

Residents in the hamlet of 2,000 feared for their safety a year ago this month, when an unusually high number of polar bears were spotted roaming through the community as part of their fall migration south.

Resident Annie Ollie told CBC News that a few polar bears have already wandered near her house on the edge Arviat. She and her family are now on high alert, said Ollie, speaking in Inuktitut.

Declining sea ice may be to blame for the influx of bears, according to local conservation officer Joe Savikataaq.

If we have a quick freeze-up and the ice goes far out from the land, then we shouldn’t have too much of bear problems,” Savikataaq said. “But if the ice keeps breaking off like last year, then we may have the same number of bears again.

“What was happening last year, we kept getting strong winds off the land and it would break the fresh ice that’s forming and take it away.”

via CBC News – North – Arviat on polar-bear watch again.

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A researcher holds a bison skull unearthed in the Arctic. Image via Astrobiology Magazine

New research indicates that, during the Pleiocene and Pleistocene eras, when most of the northern hemisphere was covered with ice, a swath of the far north remained relatvely ice-free, and was home to large grazing mammals such as mammoth, bison and Yukon horses.

This region, called Beringia, includes portions Alaska, Siberia, and the Canadian Yukon. As one of the few areas of the northern hemisphere that remained glacier-free, Beringia’s steppes played a crucial role in human and animal migration, as well as a refuge for plants and animals threatened by glaciation.

This sort of window into the Earth’s past gives scientists a better understanding of how climate change might affect life on the planet in the future. Over at Astrobiology Magazine, Aaron Gronstal notes,

Studying ancient climate conditions on Earth – and the ways in which life dealt with climate change – can help astrobiologists understand how current climate trends will affect the planet’s biosphere in the future. Environmental refuges like Beringia could have played an important role in helping life survive and evolve on our planet, even when conditions at the Earth’s surface were very inhospitable.

Life’s Ancient Island in the Ice. Via iO9.com

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Arctic Kingdom Team Members relax near Barrow Straight.

Smithsonian Magazine has a great cover story this month on “Alaska’s Great Wide Open.” It’s well worth a read, particularly for writer Pico Iyer’s meditiations of life out on the tundra:

A quiet place, I was coming to see, teaches you attention; stillness makes you keen-eared as a bear, as alert to sounds in the brush as I had been, a few days before, in Venice, to key changes in Vivaldi. That first Denali morning one of the cheerful young naturalists at the privately owned camp took a group of us out into the tundra. “Six million acres with almost no trails,” she exulted. She showed us how to “read” the skull of a caribou—its lost antler suggested it died before the spring—and handed me her binoculars, turned the wrong way round, so that I could see, as through a microscope, the difference between rushes and grass. She pointed out the sandhill cranes whose presence heralded the coming autumn, and she even identified the berries in bear scat, which she was ready to eat, she threatened, should our attention begin to flag.

via Alaska’s Great Wide Open | Travel | Smithsonian Magazine.

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