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** Updated **
Ice Core Science Community Planning Workshop 2020, April 2-3, 2020 (Virtual Meeting Only).
Please note, this event is meeting virtually only now
. Scientific discoveries achieved in the Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets and temperate glaciers are critical to society today, but they are not achieved without significant advance planning. The U.S. Ice Drilling Program (IDP) will sponsor an interdisciplinary ice community workshop to identify science driving future Arctic and Antarctic ice coring sites, the ice drilling technology that will be needed, and the timeline over the coming decade for advancing ice core science on multiple frontiers. The outcome of the workshop will be white papers describing community endeavors with associated timelines that will become part of the updated U.S. Ice Drilling Program Long Range Science Plan.
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Arctic Reading for the Quarantine:
(State of Alaska and Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium) Healthy Alaskans 2030: State Health Assessment, 2019. The State of Alaska, Department of Health and Social Services, in equal partnership with the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, leads the state health improvement plan (SHIP), Healthy Alaskans 2020 (HA2020). Healthy Alaskans 2020 is composed of 25 leading health indicators, or priorities, each with established targets to achieve by 2020. Through a comprehensive and inclusive process, organizations and communities of all levels have agreed to the HA2020 indicators and targets for the past decade. HA2020 is aimed at improving the health of all Alaskans and has a vision of Healthy Alaskans in Healthy Communities. To support this vision, HA2020 provides a framework supporting the work of partners and stakeholders statewide who are actively engaged in improving the health of Alaskans. To build this framework, specific steps have been followed, including the completion of a statewide health assessment, the prioritization of health objectives and targets for the decade for Alaska, and the identification of strategies and actions to reach those targets.
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Blog post from Dr. Carin Ashjian, research scientist from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution aboard the Polarstern and part of the MOSAiC expedition.
Hi Everyone,
March 30, Polarstern. Hard to believe that I've been on a ship for two months and have the potential ahead of me of being on board a ship for an additional two months. Luckily it is a comfortable ship with excellent food and good shipmates.
After about a month of crashing through ice on Dranitsyn, crawling at a snail's pace north towards the Polarstern, we finally arrived at Polarstern near the end of February. Driven by winds, the Polarstern at times seemed to be doing her best to evade us, drifting with the sea ice to the NW while we toiled to catch her. But finally we were able to see the lights of Polarstern on the horizon and then, after a couple more painfully slow days, we arrived to our parking spot about 1 km away.
During the transit, we saw twilight gradually increasing so the horizon was pink and purple. Venus hung huge (for Venus) and bright in the sky. When up, the moon glittered above us, illuminating the endless ice with an cool, blue glare. When we arrived at Polarstern, darkness was still the normal situation. We accomplished the transfer under the unrelenting lights of the ships, snow machines, and pisten bullies. Now, daylight has returned to the ice. Even in the middle of the night, there is no darkness. Today marks the first day when the sun will not set.
Work on the Polarstern is constant. When we first arrived, it was a real scramble to figure out what to do when, how to do the paperwork for everything (endless labels and data sheets and sample numbers). Our first weeks were dogged by very cold days that prevented use of the cranes (colder than -30C). The cranes are used to deploy the nets over the side of the ship. Every day was a challenge: will it be warm enough today? Plans were made and then had to be modified based on the temperatures. Access to the ice was through a lovely hole off the side of the ship that was covered by a heated tent when not in use, preventing the hold from freezing over (the tent required 4-6 people to move it every time we wanted to access the hole).
Serdar (the other zooplankton team member) and I were just finally feeling comfortable with the gear and what we needed to do when disaster struck: the very dynamic Arctic Ocean started to shear our ice and the ship moved relative to the hole. No more multinet! No more big ring nets! We have now switched to plan B: sample through a hole in the ice at "Ocean City" - an establishment on the ice of a tent, a hole, two winches, and an impossible array of stuff. So far we have sampled there twice.
The ice continues to move. Our ship is now located in a very large lead that developed from a crack in the airplane runway we were building (plowing snow and drifts). Once the lead developed, the ship started to move next to the ice, popping mooring lines and power cables each time. Hence the loss of our sampling hole next to the ship. For a while, the ship moved a few meters every day. The leads around us grew larger, sometimes freezing over and then re-opening. The new ice grew frost flowers (structures of ice that look like flowers), which were sampled by scientists on board. Our establishments on the ice (Ocean City, Met City, Balloon Town, ROV Hut) had to start relying on generators that require regular refueling. As the ship moved along the flow, a rubble field developed between the ship and the floe that was just barely shorter than the length of the gangplank. One more move and we will not be able to reach the ice floe using the gangplank. We might have to reposition the ship to a location nearby that is more stable.
Life on Polarstern is very comfortable. Three meals a day are served by a cheerful steward's department. The bread is homemade. There is an automatic coffee machine that dispenses coffee, espresso, cappuccino, café au lait, and absolutely killer hot chocolate. The menu is typically German, with a lot of potatoes and meat. Vegetables also are a frequent side dish and are properly cooked so that they are still crunchy! Any fresh produce on board has been away from land since late January so there is no lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers but rather the vegetables such as turnips, kohlrabi, cabbage, and beets. Right now we are working on some excellent Granny Smith apples. Of course that won't last.
I have been doing experiments with the zooplankton we collect. I have long-running egg production experiments ongoing, with about 30 female copepods inhabiting the "copepod hotel" (a box with shelves that hold individual petri dishes in each of which 1 copepod lives). This species lays eggs using stored lipid reserves. Every night I check to see which copepod has laid eggs. If she has, I transfer her to a fresh petri dish and count how many eggs she laid. I am also doing respiration experiments to find out how much oxygen the animals are consuming. I incubate a known number, depending on the size of the animal, in special, sealed glass bottles that have a "spot" on the side. Every 12 hours I shine a beam of light at the spot and the resulting light emitted, read by my probe, tells me how much oxygen is present in the bottle. By incubating for a couple of days, I can get a good estimate of the oxygen consumption. This is important to estimate the overall zooplankton oxygen consumption and hence activity and their role in the ecosystem. Finally, I have been doing grazing experiments to measure what type of food and how much food different copepod types eat. I pick out sufficient numbers of different copepod types and incubate them for 24 hours in 2.3 L bottles. At the end of the incubation, I measure the amount of chlorophyll (indicative of phytoplankton) in the bottles to see how it has changed from the start of the experiment. I also collect water to later count how many smaller zooplankton have been eaten. Chlorophyll comes from phytoplankton that require light to grow. Although chlorophyll is very low now coming out of winter, it has started to increase. So we are at the transition between winter and spring conditions, a very exciting time to be here.
As I sit in my lab, photographing copepods and putting them in tin boats for later analysis of carbon and nitrogen content, or stand in the container playing music on my iPhone and filtering water for chlorophyll content, I reflect on how what I thought would be surreal (working on a ship frozen into the ice in the middle of the Arctic Ocean) is not normal and the world that I left behind is the one that is surreal. I cannot imagine what it is like at home. Here we continue as normal on a ship. Social distancing is not a term in use. We can think of home but cannot imagine what it is really like.
I will be working here for an unknown period, at least another 2 months I estimate. Our personnel exchange of early April cannot take place because of the corona pandemic and also because we have no runway. The date of our next transfer is presently not known, sometime in June.
Stay healthy everyone!
Carin
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 White House Science Adviser Kelvin Droegemeier Will Also Lead NSF- For Now. Kelvin Droegemeier, science adviser to President Donald Trump, today was handed another job that he's always wanted-but it's only temporary. Droegemeier, a meteorologist, has been named acting director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) following the departure of France Córdova, whose 6-year term ended on 30 March. In December 2019, Trump picked Sethuraman Panchanathan to succeed Córdova. Although Panchanathan's nomination is not controversial, there's no telling when the U.S. Senate will confirm the 58-year-old computer scientist, now executive vice president at Arizona State University.
Science Magazine
Why This Rare, Huge Ozone Hole Over the Arctic is Troubling Scientists. Last week, new research declared the once-worrying fissure in the ozone layer at the South Pole to be largely vanquished. But in March, a new hole opened in the ozone, this time on the other side of the world in the atmosphere above the Arctic. The hole will likely set a new benchmark for the largest ozone hole ever recorded in the North Pole. Fortunately, even though it's three-times the size of Greenland, the tear is not likely to last long or be a danger to human health, reports Alexandra Witze in
Nature.
Smithsonian
This Unique Luxury Expedition Ship Was Supposed to Have Her Maiden Voyage From Longyearbyen on Friday-Then Came Coronavirus. "We have suspended all voyages for our fleet and charters through April 30," is the short answer from Patty Disken-Cahill, press contact with Lindblad Expeditions, when asked by the Barents Observer about the maiden voyage of the cruise pioneer's brand-new ship. Aimed for up to 126 passengers, the "National Geographic Endurance" should leave port in Longyearbyen on April 3rd for a one week voyage around Svalbard. Three following voyages in April are also canceled.
The Barents Observer
 Artificial Light in the Arctic. The Arctic polar night remains one of the last undisturbed dark environments on the planet. But as the climate changes and human activities increase in the Arctic, natural light sources - such as the moon, the stars and the aurora borealis - are being masked by much stronger illumination from artificial light. University of Delaware Professor Jonathan Cohen has co-written a new study that looks at how artificial light during the polar night disrupts Arctic fish and zooplankton behavior down to 200 meters in depth. The disruption of species behavior so far down in the water column could introduce biases on stock assessments of commercial and non-commercial fish species.
University of Delaware
Svalbard Only Arctic Region Without Corona Infection, Many Arctic Regions Have No Corona Deaths. Svalbard is the only Arctic area in which there is no Corona infection. Several Arctic regions have not registered a single death stemming from Corona. In addition to Svalbard, that also goes for Greenland, Nordland/Norway, West Botnia/Sweden, Northern Finland, the Faroe Islands, Northwestern Russia and the northern parts of Canada.
High North News
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Future Events
NOAA Deep Sea Coral Research and Technology Program Webinar Series, April 16, 2020 (Webinar). Deep-sea coral and sponge communities in the Aleutian Islands are important habitat features for many life stages of commercially important fish targets, including Atka mackerel, Pacific cod, and rockfish. The effects of commercial fishing activities on deep-sea corals and sponges has been difficult to quantify due to a lack of spatially-explicit fishery data, bottom contact by different gear types, undetermined location of corals and sponges, and the susceptibility and recovery dynamics these structure-forming invertebrates (SFI). To address these challenges, a fishing effects model was developed in the North Pacific to integrate spatially explicit VMS data with target-specific gear configurations for over 40,000 bottom trawls since 2003. Fishery observer coverage for Aleutian Island trawl fisheries is nearly 100 percent and records catch species composition. Species distribution models provide presence data for coral, sponge, Primnoidae, and Stylasteridae.
** Updated **
Securing S&T Success for the Coming Arctic, April 22-23, 2020 (Washington, DC USA).
The Arctic Domain Awareness Center hosts this annual meeting. The meeting will review the Center's current research and discuss better leveraging ADAC. The agenda includes discussions regarding the transition of ADAC's mature research and the initiation of new research associated with ADAC's recently awarded projects from ADAC's Arctic Incidence of National Significance 2019 workshop.
Cancelled
ICESAT-2 Cryospheric Science Hackweek, June 15-19, 2020 (Seattle, Washington USA). ICESat-2 Cryospheric Science Hackweek is a 5-day hackweek to be held at the University of Washington. Participants will learn about technologies used to access and process ICESat-2 data with a focus on the cryosphere. Mornings will consist of interactive lectures, and afternoon sessions will involve facilitated exploration of datasets and hands-on software development.
Arctic Circle Assembly, October 8-11, 2020 (Reykjavik, Iceland). The annual Arctic Circle Assembly is the largest annual international gathering on the Arctic, attended by more than 2000 participants from 60 countries. It is attended by heads of states and governments, ministers, members of parliaments, officials, experts, scientists, entrepreneurs, business leaders, indigenous representatives, environmentalists, students, activists and others from the growing international community of partners and participants interested in the future of the Arctic.
3rd Arctic Science Ministerial, November 21-22, 2020 (Toyko, Japan). Since the last Arctic Science Ministerial in 2018, changes in the Arctic ecosystem and the resulting impacts locally and globally have been severely felt. While the reasons for these changes in climate largely stem from activities outside of the Arctic, the Arctic is warming at a rate of nearly double the global average. Considering the need for climate change mitigation, adaptation, and repair measures, the relevance of an international Arctic Science Ministerial has never been greater. It is necessary to strengthen scientific cooperation and collaboration among both Arctic and non-Arctic States in order to develop our understanding of the rapid changes impacting the Arctic. The First Arctic Science Ministerial (ASM1) was hosted by the United States in 2016, and two years later, the Second Arctic Science Ministerial (ASM2) was co-hosted by Germany, Finland, and the European Commission. The Third Arctic Science Ministerial will be co-hosted by Iceland and Japan.
Arctic Science Summit Week, March 20-26, 2021 (Lisbon, Portugal). The Portuguese Minister of Science, Technology and Higher Education, the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) and the Local Organizing Committee will host the Arctic Science Summit Week 2021. The Conference is organized by FCT, Ciência Viva, AIR Center, the Portuguese Arctic Community and by IASC and partners. Framed by the overarching theme for the Science Conference "The Arctic: Regional Changes, Global Impacts," Lisbon invites International experts on the Arctic and Indigenous Peoples to discuss the "New Arctic" and also its impacts and interactions to and with the lower latitudes.
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