Russia has long resisted Chinese involvement in Arctic issues, considering the Arctic to be Russia's special domain. Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, though, Russia has started to allow China access to Arctic sea routes to transport Russian oil to Chinese markets. This map, from the Wall Street Journal, shows Russian oil shipments to China via the Arctic since July 15.  (Map from www.wsj.com/world/china-is-gaining-long-coveted-role-in-arctic-as-russia-yields-f5397315.)

Spring is beginning in the Southern Hemisphere, and millions of birds are heading south.  Scientists are concerned this migration will finally introduce avian flu to Antarctica and the 100 million birds that nest there as well as potentially spreading it to mammal populations that may also be vulnerable to avian flu. www.nytimes.com/2023/08/30/science/birds-flu-antarctica.html

This map highlights the growing militarization of the Arctic Ocean and its periphery.   (Map from www.wsj.com/articles/americas-military-falls-behind-russia-china-race-for-melting-arctic-2a71dfac.)

What's beneath an ice sheet? Using ice-penetrating radar and a hot drill, scientists studying the ice sheets in West Antarctica have discovered an enormous mostly-freshwater cavern with a muddy river bed at the bottom and amphipods swimming by the camera. Research continues into the foundation and scope of life in this extreme ecosystem.  www.sciencenews.org/article/cavern-west-antarctic-glacier-life

The biogeography of Siberia is changing as melting permafrost in the tundra is exposing viruses previously unknown to science, some of which have been trapped in the ice for tens of thousands of years. www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/12/02/zombie-virus-russia-permafrost-thaw/

This article from The Washington Post provides a fascinating look at cutting-edge techniques for exploring remote places -- including the use of diving robots and sensors on animals -- as well as the significance of the Denman Glacier in East Antarctica.  www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/01/18/climate-change-glacier-antarctica/

Conservationists are trying to safeguard the region of the Arctic Ocean that will be the most likely to persist as frozen ice according to climate models. This Last Ice Area, as it is being called, stretches from northwestern Greenland into the Canadian Arctic Archipelago and may serve as a refuge for organisms that depend on sea ice, from polar bears to fish and crustaceans to microbes. www.sciencenews.org/article/arctic-last-ice-area-climate-change

Did you know that there are waterfalls underwater?? The largest waterfall in the world is the Denmark Cataract, 2000 feet under the ocean in the Denmark Strait that separates Iceland and Greenland. Cold, dense water flows over the top of an undersea ridge and rapidly sinks two miles to the ocean floor, creating a "downward flow estimated at well over 123 million cubic feet per second," making this the world's largest and highest waterfall by a long shot.  (For comparison, Angel Falls is 0.6 miles tall, and average flow over Victoria Falls is 33 thousand cubic feet per second.)  oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/largest-waterfall.html

Fall in the Northern Hemisphere means seasonal Arctic sea ice is reforming, creating pathways across what, in the summer, would be open water. This map shows the path of a single Arctic fox that walked from Norway (Svalbard) across Greenland to Canada (Ellesmere Island) in 2018. www.researchgate.net/figure/Large-scale-movements-of-a-young-female-Arctic-fox-from-Svalbard-tracked-through-Argos_fig1_334026698

The area north of the Arctic Circle accounts for 6% of the Earth's surface area but is one of the hottest areas of geopolitical rivalry. Roughly 40% of this area is land -- parts of the U.S., Canada, Greenland/Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia -- and another third belongs to these same countries' continental shelves, but the balance is international water. DP World, the huge Dubai-based maritime logistics company, recently signed a deal worth up to $2 billion to help Russia expand ports, operate sea lanes, and develop ice-resistant container ships to move goods between Europe and Asia along Arctic sea routes. www.nytimes.com/2021/07/23/world/europe/arctic-shipping-russia-dubai.html

Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier has been in the news recently because analysis of satellite data revealed that from 2017 to 2020 the glacier increased the speed at which it moved toward the ocean by 12% and the glacier lost one-fifth of its area. Pine Island Glacier, part of the increasingly unstable West Antarctic Ice Sheet, contains approximately 180 trillion tons of ice and, according to researchers at the University of Washington, could be gone in the next decade or two. Pine Island Glacier and the neighboring Thwaites Glacier are already responsible for much of Antarctica’s contribution to sea-level rise. ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/304/mcs/media/images/56493000/gif/_56493507_a304x171.gif

The National Geographic Society has (finally) declared the waters around Antarctica to be the world's fifth ocean.  The Southern Ocean, defined as the waters in the Southern Hemisphere south of 60 degrees latitude which roughly corresponds to the ocean encircled by the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, can now join the other four oceans -- Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, and Arctic -- on the geography bee :-). National Geographic is late to the party: scientists, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the U.S. Board on Geographic Names (which is responsible for uniform geographic name usage across the federal government) have recognized the Southern Ocean since the 1990s. www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/theres-a-new-ocean-now-can-you-name-all-five-southern-ocean

This map has been in the news this week as climate scientists are trying to call attention to the impact of cooling waters off Greenland's southeastern coast: www.cbsnews.com/news/climate-change-map-warning/

When the earth passes through the debris left by a comet, for example, some of that interplanetary dust makes it all the way to the earth's surface. Ever wonder how much? By studying the accumulation of interplanetary dust in Antarctica, where there is virtually no source of  terrestrial dust, French researchers estimate 5200 tons of micrometeorites fall to earth every year. www.cnrs.fr/en/more-5000-tons-extraterrestrial-dust-fall-earth-each-year

The Muslim holiday of Ramadan is celebrated, in part, by fasting between sunrise and sunset. This year, Ramadan falls in April and May, making the sunrise-to-sunset period longer -- in some cases, substantially longer -- in northern locations. This geo-graphic shows the current fasting time in a sampling of world cities. www.statista.com/chart/17874/ramadan-daily-fasting-hours-selected-cities

Greenland's snap elections scheduled for Apr. 6 are generating an unusual level of international interest, in no small part because of Greenland's emergence as a potentially significant source of rare-earth metals and the controversy surrounding the ownership, politics, and consequences of a huge new rare-earth/uranium mine being planned. foreignpolicy.com/2021/03/10/greenland-election-rare-earth-elements-china-us-europe

A new report finds that the planet is losing 1.2 trillion tons of ice each year, up from 760 billion tons in the 1990s, and the pace of ice loss is accelerating. Scientists used satellite data to study land and sea ice and found the areas experiencing the greatest loss of ice are Greenland and Antarctica, where warming water is eating away at glaciers and ice sheets where they meet the sea. Moreover, the report finds that previous estimates fail "to fully account for the role of ocean undercutting" and sea-level rise from melting ice "may be underestimated by 'at least a factor of 2.'” ... “'It’s like cutting the feet off the glacier rather than melting the whole body,' said Eric Rignot, a study co-author and a glacier researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of California at Irvine. 'You melt the feet and the body falls down, as opposed to melting the whole body.'” www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/01/25/ice-melt-quickens-greenland-glaciers

There is a new geographic feature popping up in the permafrost of northern Siberia: exploding craters, in some cases well over 150 feet deep.  Scientists are working to riddle out what is causing these enormous holes, which started developing in 2013 and have been known to explode with enough force to eject rocks and ice more than 300 feet.  (Hint: methane may be playing a role.) www.bbc.com/future/article/20201130-climate-change-the-mystery-of-siberias-explosive-craters

Santa is not the only one with an interest in the North Pole. This is an excellent look at the geopolitical issues at play in the Arctic, many of which are made more pressing by climate change. foreignpolicy.com/2020/10/13/arctic-competition-resources-governance-critical-minerals-shipping-climate-change-power-map

The world's largest herd of reindeer is found in Siberia, east of the Yenisey River. The Taimyr reindeer herd numbered as many as 1,000,000 individuals in 2000 but is believed to be less than half that size today, due to commercial hunting, poaching, and habitat degradation. This article from National Geographic profiles the Taimyr reindeer: www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2020/08/poachers-target-largest-reindeer-herd-antler-velvet/

Today, Alaska's glaciers, the melting of which has already fueled about 30% of global sea level rise, are all that remains of the Cordilleran ice sheet that once covered the northwestern quadrant of North American down into what is today Idaho and Washington. Researchers are now finding, to their surprise, that temperature changes in the North Pacific, rather than the Atlantic, are perhaps a better leading indicator of global climate changes as diverse as a weakening of Asian monsoons, melting in Antarctica, and a drop in salinity in the Atlantic. www.sciencenews.org/article/north-pacific-ice-sheets-climate-change

Spring has returned to the Southern Hemisphere. In the Southern Ocean, as in the rest of the world's oceans, illegal fishing accounts for a significant proportion of all fishing activity.  In the Crozet Islands, in the far southern Indian Ocean not far north of the Antarctic Convergence (the point at which cold polar water sinks beneath slightly warmer subantarctic waters, creating a churning of nutrients and a biological and hydrological "moat" encircling Antarctica), researchers fitted albatrosses with radar devices. Because albatrosses are naturally drawn to fishing ships and can spot them from as far as 30 km away, albatrosses carrying radar sensors were used to identify fishing ships that had illegally turned off their automatic identification systems. More than a quarter of the ships albatrosses detected in the waters around the Crozet Islands, which are a French-protected marine sanctuary, had turned off their AIS as had 37% of the albatross-detected fishing ships in nearby international waters. www.popularmechanics.com/science/a30694308/bird-cops-illegal-fishing

British researchers have found that between 1994 and 2017 the earth lost 28 TRILLION metric tons of ice. This geo-graphic shows from where this ice has disappeared: www.statista.com/chart/22673/ice-lost-globally

Canada's last intact ice shelf, the second largest in the Arctic, has collapsed, losing more than 40% of its area in just two days in early July, satellite images show. The Milne ice shelf was on the northern coast of Canada's Ellesmere Island, northwest of Greenland. (Despite its remote location, Ellesmere is the world's 10th largest island.) www.severe-weather.eu/global-weather/milne-ice-shelf-collapse-canada-mk/