House Declares Snow Week. The House will be out of session this week due to "the severity of the winter storm in the D.C. area," according to an email sent to lawmakers on Sunday. The House was already scheduled for a short week, with Democratic lawmakers attending their annual legislative retreat in Baltimore from Wednesday to Friday. More than 10,000 flights were cancelled to and from the East Coast due to the blizzard this weekend, making air travel back to the nation's capital a perilous prospect. The Hill

 

US Strategy for Arctic Includes the Aleutians and Bering Sea. The rain-drenched Aleutian Islands, which curve from Alaska's mainland to Asia, lie about 800 to 1,000 miles south of the Arctic Circle. So why do the U.S. government's Arctic plans include enhanced shipping safety in the Aleutians and the similarly subarctic Bering Sea? There is a legal explanation. The 1,200-mile Aleutian chain, the Bering and other subarctic areas are considered part of the Arctic for the purposes of federal policy. Alaska Dispatch News

 

[Opinion] A Canadian Threat to Alaskan Fishing. FROM fall through spring, the fleet of commercial fishing boats here in the panhandle of Alaska stalk winter king salmon. In the mornings prisms of ice sparkle beneath the sodium lights of the docks, where I live on a World War II tugboat with my wife and 8-month-old daughter. This winter I've been out a few times fishing on the I Gotta, catching pristine wild salmon, torpedoes of muscle. But the work is slow, five fish a day, and my skipper recently traveled down to Reno, Nev., for knee surgery. New York Times

 

Researchers: 'Blob' of Unusually Warm Ocean Water May be Causing Seabirds to Starve. Thousands of the dead seabirds have been washing ashore along the state's coasts over the past several months. And Alaska Audubon spokeswoman Beth Peluso says hundreds of weak and emaciated murres have been spotted elsewhere around the state in areas they're not known to frequent. "Some of these birds that they've been finding are really starving," Peluso said. "They're not in good shape." KUAC

 

[Opinion] Heavy Fuel Oil: A Threat to Arctic Environment, People. We've all heard the expression "killing two birds with one stone." For those of us who live in the Arctic, this is a way of life. We have long traditions of being highly effective and efficient to survive in extreme conditions. By necessity, we make every action count for several times its worth. Today, the Arctic faces modern challenges. The Arctic is warming more than twice as fast as the rest of the planet. Arctic seas are melting, the seasons are shifting, and changes to so many of our ways of life hang in the balance. Alaska Dispatch News

 

Hometown U: 'Sniffing Out' a Changing Arctic. Say you're a ship captain navigating up Cook Inlet toward Anchorage, loaded to your portholes with -- oh, strawberries, cars, Christmas presents, diesel fuel. About 80 percent of food and fuel consumed in Alaska arrives through this port. On a dark and stormy night, how can you know the path ahead is free of sea ice? Or, you're the Coast Guard, responsible for ensuring foreign fishing vessels don't drift into U.S. waters. You can't be everywhere at once, so how do you monitor territory you can't even see? Alaska Dispatch News

 

Federal Agency Calls for Research into Alaska Seabird Deaths. A federal laboratory that assesses disease in wildlife is calling for more research into the deaths of thousands of common murres and other seabirds off Alaska's coast. The National Wildlife Health Center, part of the U.S. Geological Survey, on Friday issued a wildlife bulletin on emaciated common murres found dead over the past 11 months. Fairbanks Daily News-Miner

 

What's Behind the Arctic's Increasing Carbon Dioxide Fluctuations? It's no mystery why carbon dioxide (CO2) levels fluctuate with the seasons: As greenery grows in the spring and summer, it soaks up the planet-warming gas, and when trees shed their leaves in the autumn, some of that gas returns to the atmosphere. But scientists haven't figured out why the differences between summer and winter concentrations of CO2 have been growing substantially at Arctic latitudes since the 1960s-in some regions, the fluctuations have increased as much as 25%. A new computer simulation fingers long-term warming in the Arctic, which has led to the proliferation of plants across large swaths of the landscape. The simulation was calibrated by using satellite observations, which have long showed increased greening across much of the Arctic since the early 1980s (including tundra sites such as those in eastern Russia, above). If the effects of climate change weren't included in the model, the trends toward bigger seasonal variations in CO2 at Arctic latitudes disappeared, researchers report online today in Science. Science Magazine