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the National Snow and Ice Data Center, in Boulder, Colorado, announced that the Arctic sea ice had reached a new low. The sea ice shrinks in the summer and grows again during winter’s long polar night. It usually reaches its minimum extent in mid-September. On September 16, 2012, the N.S.I.D.C. reported, the sea ice covered 1.3 million square miles. This was just half of its average extent during the nineteen-eighties and nineties, and nearly twenty per cent less than its extent in 2007, the previous record-low year.

It would be difficult to overstate the significance of this development. We are now seeing changes occur in a matter of years that, in the normal geological scheme of things, should take thousands, even millions of times longer than that. On the basis of the 2012 melt season, one of the world’s leading experts on the Arctic ice cap, Peter Wadhams, of Cambridge University, has predicted that the Arctic Ocean will be entirely ice-free in summer by 2016. Since open water absorbs sunlight, while ice tends to reflect it, this will accelerate global warming. Meanwhile, recent research suggests that the melting of the Arctic ice cap will have, and indeed is probably already having, a profound effect on the U.S. and Europe, making extreme weather events much more likely. As Jennifer Francis, a scientist at Rutgers, observed recently in a conference call with reporters, the loss of sea ice changes the dynamics of the entire system: “It’s like having a new energy source for the atmosphere.”

You might have thought that with the Arctic melting, the U.S. in the midst of what will almost certainly be the warmest year on record, and more than sixty per cent of the lower forty-eight states experiencing “moderate to exceptional” drought, at least one of the candidates would feel compelled to speak out about the issue. If that’s the case, though, you probably live in a different country.

Ice is melting in unprecedented ways as summer approaches in the Arctic. In recent days, observations have revealed a record-challenging melt event over the Greenland ice sheet, while the extent of ice over the Arctic Ocean has never been this low in mid-June during the age of weather satellites.

Greenland saw temperatures soar up to 40 degrees above normal Wednesday

The extreme conditions in the Arctic, which have resulted in these record-challenging melt events, have far-reaching implications. There is a saying often repeated by Arctic researchers: “What happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic.”

“There is no reason to think that in 30 years much of anything will be as it is today,” one of the editors of a new report on the Arctic climate said.

The Arctic continued its unwavering shift toward a new climate in 2020, as the effects of near-record warming surged across the region, shrinking ice and snow cover and fueling extreme wildfires, scientists said Tuesday in an annual assessment of the region.

This year the minimum extent of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean, reached at the end of the melt season in September, was the second-lowest in the satellite record, the scientists reported

Rune Rafaelsen has a bold plan that could raise the profile of his remote Arctic town — with a little help, he hopes, from China.

He is the mayor of Sor-Varanger, a municipality in the far northeast corner of Norway, close to the Russian border. His office is in the small town Kirkenes — population a little over 3,500 — which overlooks the icy gray Barents Sea.

"Now you can go from Asia to Europe through the Northern Sea Route.

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration on Tuesday suspended oil drilling leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, unspooling a signature achievement of the Trump presidency and delivering on a promise by President Biden to protect the fragile Alaskan tundra from fossil fuel extraction.

The decision sets up a process that could halt drilling in one of the largest tracts of untouched wilderness in the United States, home to migrating waterfowl, caribou and polar bears. But it also lies over as much as 11 billion barrels of oil and Democrats and Republicans have fought over whether to allow drilling there for more than four decades.

While the move follows President Biden’s Inauguration Day executive order to halt new Arctic drilling, it also serves as a high-profile way for the president to solidify his environmental credentials after coming under fire from activists angered by his recent quiet support for some fossil fuel projects.

Record return of Arctic ice cap as it grows by 60% in a year

A chilly Arctic summer has left nearly a million more square miles of ocean covered with ice than at the same time last year – an increase of 60 per cent.

the BBC reported that global warming would leave the Arctic ice-free in summer by 2013.

The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere reached record levels in 2020, hitting 417 parts per million in May. The last time CO2 levels exceeded 400 parts per million was around four million years ago, during the Pliocene era, when global temperatures were 2-4C warmer and sea levels were 10-25 metres (33-82 feet) higher than they are now.

The past decade was the hottest on record. The year 2020 was more than 1.2C hotter than the average year in the 19th Century. In Europe it was the hottest year ever, while globally 2020 tied with 2016 as the warmest. Record temperatures, including 2016, usually coincide with an El Niño event (a large band of warm water that forms in the Pacific Ocean every few years), which results in large-scale warming of ocean surface temperatures. But 2020 was unusual because the world experienced a La Niña event (the reverse of El Niño, with a cooler band of water forming). In other words, without La Niña bringing global temperatures down, 2020 would have been even hotter.

Nowhere is that increase in heat more keenly felt than in the Arctic. In June 2020, the temperature reached 38C in eastern Siberia, the hottest ever recorded within the Arctic Circle. The heatwave accelerated the melting of sea ice in the East Siberian and Laptev seas and delayed the usual Arctic freeze by almost two months

Royal Dutch Shell PLC says it's ceasing exploration in offshore Alaska for the foreseeable future.

an exploratory well drilled to 6,800 feet found oil and gas but not in sufficient quantities.

Shell drilled in 150 feet of water about 80 miles off Alaska's northwest coast.

If God had built mountains in eastern Ukraine, then the great expanse of flatland that is the European Plain would not have been such inviting territory for the invaders who have attacked Russia from there repeatedly through history. As things stand, Putin, like Russian leaders before him, likely feels he has no choice but to at least try to control the flatlands to Russia’s west.

rules of geography are especially clear in Russia, where power is hard to defend, and where for centuries leaders have compensated by pushing outward.

t it’s helpful to look at Putin’s military interventions abroad in the context of Russian leaders’ longstanding attempts to deal with geography.

Thanks to the record-breaking Arctic outbreak that stretched all the way into Texas, February was the coldest it has been across the US in over 30 years, says the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. However, across the US, it was still in the top third of warmest winters on record.

The Arctic Oscillation may have resulted from a sudden stratospheric warming event that occurred in January, said NOAA.

"It goes to show how much humans have warmed the planet when even with such a powerful polar-vortex unleashing of arctic cold dominates the month, the Earth still manages to produce above-normal temperatures. Look no further than Europe, which was several countries set all-time record high temperatures for the month of February."

Giant kelp is among the best organisms on the planet for taking planet-warming gases out of the atmosphere. Buoyed by small, gas-filled bulbs called “bladders,” these huge algae grow toward the ocean surface at a pace of up to two feet per day. Their flexible stems and leafy blades form a dense underwater canopy that can store 20 times as much carbon as an equivalent expanse of terrestrial trees.

Yet this powerful force for planetary protection is under siege. Warming waters and worsening storms caused by climate change have weakened the kelp forests.

Most significantly, the demise of important predators such as otters and sea stars has led to an explosion in the population of sea urchins, which eat kelp.

Russia has dropped piracy charges against 30 Greenpeace activists, replacing them with hooliganism charges, according to officials.

The new charge has a maximum penalty of seven years rather than 15. Greenpeace says it is still "wildly disproportionate".

Greenpeace's Arctic Sunrise vessel was seized by Russian forces as activists tried to scale an offshore oil platform.

The weather's been positively toasty across much of the east coast over the past several days, especially for a December. In New York, Sunday temperatures shattered a 30-year-old record, hitting 70 degrees Fahrenheit. And the month has been chock-full of 60-plus days.

So what's going on? Is this a climate change thing, or a welcome boon from the ongoing El Nino tropical weather event? The answer actually lies with a buzzword from 2014's equally extreme temperatures: the polar vortex.

Mike Halpert, deputy director of the Climate Prediction Center at the National Weather Service, said last week the band of cold air surrounding the arctic -- called the "Arctic Oscillation" -- is particularly tight right now. During the polar vortex, pressure changes in that band of air caused it to slow and slip down towards America, bringing with it a wave of Arctic air that led to well below zero temperatures.

Analysis of satellite data reveals astounding loss of 600bn tons of ice last summer as Arctic experienced hottest year on record

Last year’s summer was so warm that it helped trigger the loss of 600bn tons of ice from Greenland – enough to raise global sea levels by 2.2mm in just two months, new research has found.

Glaciers are melting away around the world due to global heating caused by the human-induced climate crisis. Ice is reflective of sunlight so as it retreats the dark surfaces underneath absorb yet more heat, causing a further acceleration in melting.

The Biden administration Tuesday took its first steps toward reversing the opening of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’s coastal plain to oil drilling, by suspending leases issued in the final days of the Trump administration.

And on his first day in office, on Jan. 20, he directed the Interior Department to put a “temporary mortarium” on all oil and gas leasing activities in the refuge, and to review the environmental impacts of the Trump administration’s oil and gas program for the area. 

All activities related to the program — including the current leases — are suspended until the review is complete. The department will then decide whether the leases should be “reaffirmed, voided, or subject to additional mitigation measures,”

WASHINGTON — President Biden may be forced to hold a new lease sale for oil drilling in the pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, despite his vows to slash fossil fuel pollution and his action this week to suspend Arctic drilling leases that had been awarded in the final days of the Trump administration.

Last month, the world’s leading energy agency warned that governments around the globe must stop approving fossil fuel projects now if they want to prevent the pollution they produce from driving average global temperatures above 2 degrees Celsius compared with preindustrial levels. That’s the threshold beyond which scientists say the Earth will experience irreversible damage.

Mr. Parenteau and other legal experts noted that the Biden administration could find ways to delay or diminish the second auction of drilling leases. For example, while the law requires the Interior Department to hold an auction, it does not require that the agency actually award any leases, he said.

President Trump has rolled back environmental regulations, pulled the United States out of the Paris climate accord, brushed aside dire predictions about the effects of climate change, and turned the term “global warming” into a punch line rather than a prognosis.

Mr. Trump and his political appointees are launching a new assault.

In the next few months, the White House will complete the rollback of the most significant federal effort to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, initiated during the Obama administration. It will expand its efforts to impose Mr. Trump’s hard-line views on other nations, building on his retreat from the Paris accord and his recent refusal to sign a communiqué to protect the rapidly melting Arctic region unless it was stripped of any references to climate change.

Just two weeks before President-elect Joe Biden takes office, the Trump administration is trying to lock-in oil and gas drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge with a hastily scheduled and controversial lease sale.

The event, January 6, marks a major moment in a 40-year fight over whether to develop the northernmost slice of the refuge's coastal plain, home to migrating caribou, birds and polar bears.

'We don't know very much about this area'

In a last-minute push, the Trump administration announced Thursday that it will auction off drilling rights in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in just over a month, setting up a final showdown with opponents before President-elect Joe Biden takes office.

After finishing its environmental review in August, the Trump administration then launched a "call for nominations" on Nov. 17. That's a 30-day window for oil companies to confidentiality tell the government which pieces of land they'd like included in a lease sale. But the BLM did not wait 30 days before going ahead and scheduling a sale date, which will take place just two weeks before President Trump leaves office.

Already, conservation and tribal groups, as well as a coalition of 15 states, have filed lawsuits challenging the Trump administration's environmental reviews. And drilling opponents blasted Thursday's announcement of the lease sale.