Permafrost turns out to not be quite as "perma" as Soviet planners thought. When the Soviet Union threw up new cities in Siberia to support the extraction of various natural resources there, infrastructure and buildings, including multistory apartment buildings, were constructed on top of the permafrost. Now, as the permafrost has begun to melt and shift, the structural integrity of these cities is at risk. A new study looks at engineering threats to Siberia's cities: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gere.12214/full Permafrost underlies as much as 2/3 of Russia's landmass.
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It's the beginning of summer in Antarctica, and scientists have announced that a section of Antarctica's ice shelf the size of Delaware is likely to break off this season. The Larsen C ice shelf is Antarctica's 4th largest and sits atop the Weddell Sea, near the end of the peninsula that points towards the tip of South America. If the 5,000 square km chunk of Larsen C does break off, it will create one of the largest icebergs ever recorded. This photo is an aerial view of the crack, which abruptly fissured an additional 18 km last month. www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/01/06/the-crack-in-this-antarctic-ice-shelf-just-grew-by-11-miles-a-break-could-be-imminent/
The Arctic Circle passes through eight countries* and is the northernmost of the five major circles of latitude (e.g., Equator, Tropic of Capricorn). The precise location of the Arctic Circle varies with the tilt of the earth on its axis but is defined as the southernmost location from which the sun is still visible at midnight at least once a year and from which the sun is not visible at noon at least once a year. This geography imposes unusual conditions, beyond the cold, for life above the Arctic Circle. This article details some of the surprising adaptations of the reindeer (or caribou) to its extreme geography: www.bbc.com/earth/story/20151209-why-reindeer-noses-are-more-amazing-than-you-think *Can you name all eight countries without looking at a map? [answers: Russia, Canada, the U.S. (in Alaska), Denmark (in Greenland), Iceland (in territorial islands), Norway, Sweden, and Finland] This series of maps shows changes in minimum annual sea ice at the poles between 1980 and 2016. (The darker blue is sea ice; the lighter blue is where sea ice used to be.) The presence or absence of sea ice has a significant impact on biogeography as well as on local and global physical geography: sea ice reflects 80% of the sunlight that hits it, whereas open water reflects only 10% of the sunlight that hits it, absorbing (and being heated by) the other 90%. www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2016/11/daily-chart-14
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