Siberia

From Russia, with love

by Gareth September 24, 2008

The work of the Swedish and Russian team on the Yakov Smirnitsky has finally found its way into the mainstream media, with Steve Connor at the Independent in London reporting the final post at the ISSS-08 blog I’ve been linking to for the last month or two. It’s not good news – they’ve found dramatic [...]

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I’m (possibly/probably) a loser

by Gareth September 19, 2008

The National Snow & Ice Data Centre in the USA has declared that this year’s minimum Arctic sea ice extent has been reached – 4.52 million square kilometres on September 12th, only 390,000 km2 more than the record 2007 minimum (and 2.24 m km2 below the 1979-2000 average minimum). It looks as though their line [...]

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Dragging the river

by Gareth September 5, 2008

In an update to my last post on Arctic methane, I linked to a Swedish team blogging their research on the Yakov Smirnitsky, a Russian vessel currently cruising the seas to the north of Siberia. The most recent post there is fascinating, but the Google translation rather difficult to follow, so I asked Magnus Westerstrand, [...]

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You ain’t seen nothing yet

by Gareth August 29, 2008

This year’s Arctic sea ice minimum is now officially the second lowest in the record according to the National Snow & Ice Data Center in the US. On August 26, the ice extent stood at 5.26m km2, dropping below 2005′s 5.32m km2. The melt season still has several weeks left to run, and there are [...]

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I scare myself

by Gareth August 24, 2008

More news from the Arctic. While the German research vessel Polarstern is cruising through the Northwest Passage, the Russian Yakov Smirnitsky is touring the Siberian seas measuring methane – and the news from scientists on board is not good. Igor Semiletov of the Pacific Oceanology Institute of the Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy [...]

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Hole in the ice

by Gareth July 3, 2008

The National Snow & Ice Data Centre in the US is issuing regular (monthly, though they might have to become more frequent soon) updates on the progress of this year’s Arctic melt season. Today they released their report for June, and like their earlier reports (accessed from the drop down menu top right on the [...]

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Santa’s blues

by Gareth June 28, 2008

What’s a Christmas icon to do, when all the ice at the North Pole disappears in summer? This startling question is posed by the latest flush of media attention to events in the Arctic. First there was a National Geographic story on June 20th speculating that the North Pole would be ice free this summer [...]

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It’s the end of the world as we know it (and I don’t feel fine)

by Gareth June 13, 2008

For REM, it “starts with an earthquake, birds and snakes, an aeroplane“, for us, it looks like diminishing Arctic sea ice is the sign. Over at Open Mind, the blogger formerly known as Tamino looks in some detail at the sea ice/rapid warming paper I linked to yesterday. His post makes for sober reading. David [...]

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It’s a gas, gas, gas

by Gareth April 30, 2008

It’s not good news. The USA’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has produced its annual report on greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere, and carbon dioxide concentration continues its accelerated growth. And there are signs that methane levels are beginning to rise, after a decade of remaining more or less static. The BBC reports: [...]

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Winter wonderland

by Gareth April 8, 2008

Climate cranks are keen to paint the last northern hemisphere (boreal) winter as unusually cold – a clear sign, they say, that “global warming is over”, and that global cooling has begun. Every crank’s at it: Bob Carter at Muriel’s place, Gerrit van der Lingen in an article in a Christchurch magazine and Vincent Gray [...]

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