Background Articles

When Arctic fish are too hot, they can get lethargic, slow down, and possibly turn back during their migration to seek cooler water. When the water gets really warm they can even lose their ability to stay upright.

The sudden deaths of some 330 elephants in northwestern Botswana earlier this year may have occurred because they drank water contaminated by toxic blue-green algae, the government announced Monday.

This year has seen a dramatic increase in bear activity with bear-related calls up by 600%, according to police chief Heath Scott. As many as 22 bears have been shot in defense of property this year.

Researchers have identified an invasive blood-sucking parasite on mud shrimp in the waters of British Columbia's Calvert Island. The discovery represents the northern-most record of the parasite on the West Coast and is likely an indication of its ability to spread without human transport.

If carbon emissions continue at current rates, so much mercury will leach from thawing permafrost that fish in the Yukon River could become dangerous to eat within a few decades.

Parks Canada's website says that early park management practices resulted in too many wolves, while trails used for skiing and snowshoeing also made easy access for wolves to prey on the caribou herds. Habitat loss as a result of increased wildfires, insect outbreaks and human activity have also contributed to the population decline.

"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.