All posts tagged: the Arctic

Experts warn of rapid loss of water in the Baltic Sea: ‘A vibrant reef is turning into an underwater wasteland’

Experts warn of rapid loss of water in the Baltic Sea: ‘A vibrant reef is turning into an underwater wasteland’

Published by Sam Flores

While global water and ocean levels are rising, the Baltic Sea lost 275 billion tonnes of water at the beginning of February. It is now 67 cm lower than the average recorded in 1886. The situation, although it has not happened for 140 years, is caused by atmospheric factors. On the surface, these should not be a cause for concern, but, as Dr Tomasz Kijewski of the Institute of Oceanology of the Polish Academy of Sciences told Euronews, such a deviation is a glaring example of the impact of climate change on the environment. The Arctic plays the first fiddle here. ‘The open refrigerator effect’ If water levels are rising, why has so much water disappeared in the Baltic Sea basin? Experts explain that it is the result of strong winds, a high pressure zone and the absence of significant atmospheric fronts. “The long-lasting strong easterly winds persisting since the beginning of January have pushed water masses through the Danish Straits towards the North Sea, resulting in a drop in levels throughout the basin,” reads …

Polar bears are getting fatter in the fastest-warming place on Earth

Polar bears are getting fatter in the fastest-warming place on Earth

Published by skeptic

Researchers tracked the body condition of polar bears in Svalbard Jon Aars, Norsk Polarinstitutt Polar bears have been getting fatter even as sea ice disappears in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, the fastest-warming place on Earth – but scientists don’t expect the good times to last. The northern Barents Sea, which stretches between Svalbard and Russia’s Novaya Zemlya in the Arctic Ocean, has been heating up seven times faster than the globe as a whole. The sea ice around Svalbard lasts two months less in winter and spring than it did two decades ago. Bears now have to swim 200 to 300 kilometres between hunting grounds on the ice and snow dens on the islands where they give birth. But the average size and weight of the Svalbard bears have increased since 2000, a finding that surprised Jon Aars at the Norwegian Polar Institute, who led the study. “We should think about this as good news for Svalbard,” he says. “But if you want bad news, you can just go and look somewhere else where you have …

Sinking trees in Arctic Ocean could remove 1 billion tonnes of CO2

Sinking trees in Arctic Ocean could remove 1 billion tonnes of CO2

Published by skeptic

Trees floating towards the Arctic Ocean Carl Christoph Stadie/The Alfred Wegener Institute Cutting down swathes of boreal forest and sinking the trees into the depths of the Arctic Ocean could remove up to 1 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year. Coniferous trees prone to wildfires could be felled and carried to the ocean by six major Arctic rivers including the Yukon and Mackenzie, where they would sink in about a year, according to a team of researchers. “There is now a forest that is sequestering lots of carbon, but now the next thing is how to store it in a way that won’t get burned,” says Ulf Büntgen at the University of Cambridge. Humanity will need to find ways to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to compensate for industries that are hard to electrify – or even to begin reducing atmospheric CO2 levels. Direct air capture machines are expensive, however, and planting trees can backfire if they die or burn. Several companies are burying wood, and US firm Running Tide …

Some Arctic warming ‘irreversible’ even if we cut atmospheric CO2

Some Arctic warming ‘irreversible’ even if we cut atmospheric CO2

Published by skeptic

A glacier meets the sea in Dickson Fjord, Greenland Jane Rix/Alamy The Arctic will retain about 1.5°C of warming even if the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere returns to pre-industrial levels and the planet as a whole cools. The region is also predicted to retain about 0.1 millimetres per day of excess precipitation, regardless of whether we deploy large-scale carbon dioxide removal (CDR) projects. “These findings highlight the irreversible nature of Arctic climate change even under aggressive CDR scenarios,” the researchers wrote in the study. Atmospheric CO2 levels are currently about 1.5 times as high as they were in the pre-industrial era, and the Arctic has warmed by more than 3°C. A study published in March found that average sea ice extent would remain 1 million square kilometres smaller even if excess CO2 was removed. In the new study, Xiao Dong at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics in Beijing and his colleagues predicted the Arctic’s potential to retain warming using 11 independent climate models. In a first, it suggests that precipitation will also stay elevated, …

Grolar and pizzly bears: What the family drama of interbreeding polar and grizzly bears reveals

Grolar and pizzly bears: What the family drama of interbreeding polar and grizzly bears reveals

Published by skeptic

A grolar bear in the Arctic Steven J. Kazlowski/Alamy Meet our story’s protagonist: a female polar bear. Displaced by shrinking sea ice in the Arctic, she was forced to wander south, deeper into the Canadian Northwest Territories. Here, our lady in white encountered a couple of handsome grizzly bears. She fell for both of them and had two cubs by each – three “grolar bear” daughters and a son. Thus began a remarkable dynasty, a lineage as intertwined as any in a Shakespearean tragedy. The next phase was equally as unlikely. Once one of the daughters reached adulthood, she mated with her own biological father and also her mother’s other grizzly suitor – essentially her stepfather. The result? Four cubs that were genetically her siblings, children and cousins, all at once. In 2006, a hunter in the Canadian Arctic shot dead an animal displaying physical characteristics of both grizzly and polar bears. Genetic tests later confirmed that it was a grolar, a member of this modern hybrid family. A decade afterwards, when researchers revealed the …