The Government of Nunavut is hosting a leadership forum in August to build capacity among Nunavummiut women. The GN’s department of Family Services is hosting the four-day event with funding provided through the federal government’s Women and Gender Equality Canada department. The forum aims to empower Nunavut’s women and girls using traditional knowledge, skills, and their roles as natural leaders.

A new study shows that disappearing sea ice is a significant element of the food web supporting female walruses and their dependent young in the Arctic's Chukchi Sea. Researchers were able to trace biomarkers that are unique to algae growing within sea ice to connect marine mammals with a food source that is rapidly diminishing in the face of climate change.

An unusual pattern of winds drove old Arctic sea ice into a precarious position in the winter of 2020. Now in warming waters, large swathes of the Arctic’s diminishing store of old ice lie at risk of melting. But how did this happen, and why is old ice so important? When winter’s darkness falls on the Arctic Ocean, temperatures plunge to below -30°C. Existing floating ice thickens as the seawater below freezes, and the ice advances into areas that were previously open water.

As climate change raises the ocean’s temperature, some fish species are moving poleward to cooler waters. In the United States, as elsewhere, commercial fishers are trying to adapt. But as a new study of trawler communities along the US east coast documents, fishers’ efforts to adjust are being constrained by a regulatory environment that isn’t adapting with them.

The newest edition of Polar Prediction News was recently released. Edited by the International Coordination Office for Polar Prediction, the PolarPredictNews reports on recent, ongoing and upcoming activities during the Year of Polar Prediction. With this newsletter, the editors are aiming to build a common platform to exchange information, updates, and developments in polar prediction.

In this talk, Prof. Andrew Stuhl will examine the state of knowledge that Pimlott experienced as a constitutive element of energy frontiers, environmental regimes, and struggles for Indigenous rights in the late twentieth-century Arctic. This event is part of the Arctic Environmental Humanities Workshop Series and is hosted by The Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University’s Pardee School of Global Studies and the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge.

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.

For the most up-to-date COVID information, please see the the US Embassy in Reykjavik's COVID page: here.

For the first time, a Regional Conference on Permafrost will be combined with the bi-annual 19th International Conference on Cold Regions Engineering. This conference is hosted by the US Permafrost Association, the American Society of Civil Engineers, the International Permafrost Association, the Permafrost Young Researchers Network, and the University of Colorado Boulder. A complete list of planned sessions is available here.

The Maritime Risk Symposium is an annual three-day conference in which government and maritime industry leaders, port representatives, researchers, and solution providers convene to examine current and emerging threats to maritime security. Government agencies, commercial entities, institutions of research, and higher education come together to discuss various threats, challenges, and risks to international and domestic maritime sectors.

The European Commission and the European External Action Service will organize a high-level EU Arctic Forum and the Annual Arctic Indigenous Peoples’ Dialogue. The EU Arctic Forum will bring together key Arctic players and stakeholders to assess recent developments in the region and discuss challenges ahead. The event will provide a strategic outlook for the updated EU Arctic policy and delve into topics that are of particular significance for the Arctic’s inhabitants.

The New England Arctic Network (NEAN) will host its 2021 meeting at the University of New England in Portland, Maine. Additional information will be published soon. 

Arctic Symposium 2021 continues momentum in Arctic defense and security collaboration established in prior ALCOM-hosted events. AAS21 seeks to address the challenges faced by the U.S. military and our allies and partners in understanding and responding to our respective national interests. AAS21 is planned and organized by the Arctic Domain Awareness Center at the University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA) in support and in compliance to guidance from Alaskan Command (ALCOM) Staff and Commander. More information available soon.

Hosted entirely online the ArcticNet Virtual Annual Scientific Meeting 2021 (ASM2021) is a hub for Arctic research in Canada. The ASM2021 brings together researchers from the natural, health, and social sciences to meet the challenges and opportunities of a rapidly changing Arctic region, shaped by climate change and modernization. This conference will push the boundaries of our collective understanding of the Arctic and strengthen our ability to address the Arctic issues of today and tomorrow.

The National Academies’ Polar Research Board is convening the following session at the Fall AGU meeting.

Organizers announce, that due to the coronavirus outbreak, the 2nd Symposium on Polar Microbes and Viruses has been postponed to 2022. This symposium will bring together molecular microbial ecologists specializing in different organism groups to share our latest results and discuss methodological problems, as well as future prospects in the field, including practical international collaborations. The environmental focus will be on cryospheric environments including sea ice, glaciers, ice sheets, and permafrost, but excellent research in other polar environments is also invited. The methods to be discussed will focus on 'omics' techniques, ranging from single cells to metagenomes, but research using additional methods is encouraged as well.