Background Articles

"Until now, bowhead whales in the U.S. Pacific Arctic were thought to experience minimal predation pressure from killer whales. Our study suggests that is no longer the case,” said Amy Willoughby.

People in Newtok have been without power for almost three weeks. Families without personal generators have seen their freezers thaw out, and watched a summer’s worth of subsistence harvest go to waste.

The Red Dog Mine announced last week that it was able to start the use of a new waste water treatment system to purify water after record-breaking warm weather in 2019 caused the sediment levels to rise in the Ikalukrok and Wulik Rivers.

Glaciers are melting, permafrost thaws and buildings are sagging. What scares the scientists most is studies of decomposing carbon from beneath the ground being emitted to the atmosphere as CO2 or methane.

The mounds are believed to be caused by the build up of methane gas in pockets of thawing permafrost under the surface  Dissecting them like surgical abscesses to release the gas is seen as one solution to avoid future eruptions.

The findings bolster reports by Alaska subsistence fishermen that the species’ numbers have been increasing as the Arctic warms at more than double the rate of the rest of the globe.

Permafrost thaw surrounding the massive Red Dog Mine is releasing higher natural levels of dissolved minerals and other particles into streams, Teck Resources Ltd. says

Some biologists think the trend is related to the reduced hunting pressure from Outside hunters this year.

In the largest study of glacial lakes ever conducted, researchers using satellite data from NASA and Google Earth have found the volume of water in glacial lakes has increased by 50 per cent since 1990 as glaciers melt due to climate change.

The expedition's easy journey from Greenland to the North Pole is another indicator of how the Arctic is impacted by climate change more than anywhere else on Earth, writes CBC's northern meteorologist.

The shrinking of chinook, sockeye, coho and chum salmon has a negative impact on the number of eggs fish lay, but smaller body sizes also mean fewer meals, fewer commercial fishing dollars and fewer nutrients transported into rivers every year.

The size of salmon returning to rivers in Alaska has declined dramatically over the past 60 years because they are spending fewer years at sea, according to a new study led by researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

At the outset, it seemed that there might be an environmental silver lining to the global pandemic. However, the same cannot be said for our oceans, which have been hard hit in recent months. COVID-19 triggered an estimated global use of 129 billion face masks and 65 billion gloves every month. If we stitched together all of the masks manufactured already, and projected to be produced, we’d be able to cover the entire landmass of Switzerland.

In Omsk, court enforcement officers suspended the operation of an asphalt mixing plant, which emits harmful substances into the air.

The Interdepartmental Working Group approved a list of priority measures to eliminate environmental damage in the town of Usolie-Sibirskoye, Irkutsk Region. This was reported by the press service of Deputy Prime Minister Victoria Abramchenko.

In the Murmansk region, the reclamation of a large waste storage facility for the former Snezhnaya poultry farm, which ceased to exist about 15 years ago, has begun. The total cost of the project is over 461 million rubles.

Radiation, chemical and biological forces tackle two million tonnes of toxic chemical waste with huge mercury stockpile and oil poisons.

This year is shaping up to be the worst for sockeye salmon in the Fraser River since tracking began in 1893, according to the Pacific Salmon Commission.

The largest part of the continental United States to warm more than 2 degrees Celsius since 1895 feeds the Colorado River.

A combination in Colorado of paltry spring snow, warmer temperatures that triggered earlier melting of winter mountain snowpack, feeble rain through summer, and parched soil from previous dry years led to this formal label.